JooJoo [CrunchPad] Tablet Review

Tuesday, December 08th, 2009 | #Tags: gizmos, joojoo, MID, Tablet

CrunchPad may have been declared Dead, here comes JooJoo creating life from it’s ashes. Built by Fusion Garage, this tablet is worth a look.

Note: This is a “early” First Look Review

What’s In: The device runs on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor with 1GB RAM. The screen is Multitouch 12-inch, 1366×768 resolution. On the graphics part, GPU + CPU combination, looks like an Nvidia Ion chipset. Since, the device is able to play 1080p YouTube videos smoothly, it’s supposed to have a good Nvidia acceleration for HD. Currently, only Nvidia Ion finds it`s place in portable FullHD video.

There’s an accelerometer that takes care of the orientations.

Other Features include 3.5mm headphone jack, a microphone jack, a built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam, a charging port and a USB slot.It will ave an option to plugin a 3G card. The built-in speakers for playing back audio are pretty average.

Overall Feel

Browsing on the Tablet is a charm. Page loads pretty fast, though not something comparable with Chrome. The Tab switching animation/transitions are handled very smoothly by the device.

It’s fast, and handles gestures (pinching to go back a level, swiping to move up and down) just fine. There are other gestures that will be included in the final build, like two finger swiping for going back and forth in history and a bookmark swipe, but we didn’t get to see that. But, you can’t zoom into text. That’s partially because the pinching is already used for going in and out of your windows into the home screen, but also partially because the screen is 12 inches. You don’t need to really zoom into text on a laptop-sized screen of 12 inches.

Your home screen is composed almost entirely of icons—shortcuts—to web applications. The screen is customizable with your own applications, eventually, and has a weird feature where it displays a different color background whenever you go back to it. Fusion Garage is thinking of taking this out, or swapping it with some other feature.

As for multitasking, Fusion Garage says that they will have specific APIs available to webapps to incorporate in order to pass notifications up to the user. For example, if Twitter refreshes in another window and you’re watching a YouTube video, a popup will show and tell you you have something else going on. The APIs will be available at launch, but it’s up to websites to support them.

On the outside, the body is solid, sturdy. The back is curved and made of a hybrid plastic good on hold, and it doesn’t feel heavy even after prolonged use.

The entire system is just like Chrome OS: Browser. The Browser is based on Webkit, the same engine that powers Safari and Google Chrome. And they also said they may make LARGER sized tablets as well, with 12 being their smallest size.

Have a look at the Video We just found and uploaded:

The Keyboard is something I’m worried about. The on-screen keyboard is totally crappy and makes it almost impossible to type fast or with both hands. May be future software upgrades will fix that.

The concept remains same as Chrome Netbooks launching next year: “internet is the application”, which means you can’t save photos or files locally and you can’t access any of the 4GB of storage to do any user level stuff. this looks totally weired though.

What seemed strange was that there is no support for PDF natively, you have to depend on the online Google Docs for reading all PDFs.

Verdict?

If you want a Chrome OS concept Tablet, JooJoo looks solid. Fusion Garage had thier homework well done on the device specially on the Video/multimedia part.

Pre-orders start this weekend (11th December) and the device ships 8-0 weeks after that. However, the software is only 3/4th done. The time allotted is too short, we believe. If they can manage to get it stable and out , $500 isn’t a bad deal. Compare this with Netbooks, good ones do cost in this range. A Price of $300 could made this a killer Tablet, but I guess it comes with the extra cost that early adopters will have to pay.

Of course no one has stress tested the device for heavy videos and webapps. So waiting a while makes sense. Stay tuned for more on the device. Pre-orders available here from this Friday.