The Technology Life

by Michael Bettiol on February 5th, 2010 at 6:19am

Filed under: Hardware 52 Comments

 

It might have legal issues galore thanks to Chandra Rathakrishnan’s legendary row with Michael Arrington, but the internet tablet formerly known as the CrunchPad has finally entered into production and should begin shipping later this month. To retail for $499 USD, the JooJoo features a 12.1″ multi-touch capacitive display with native resolution of 1366 x 768, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, 4GB SSD, front-facing camera, accelerometer, support for Flash (HD Flash will be all systems go when 10.1 comes out of beta) as well as a bunch of givens like integrated speakers, a 3.5mm headphone jack and USB port. Also announced today is Fusion Garage’s intent to open an app web store in which JooJoo owners will be able to grab whatever developers can make using some proprietary “but standards driven” APIs. Rathakrishnan et al are rather confident that their device will be able to take on competitors such as the HP Slate and Apple iPad, even going so far as to say of the later that the JooJoo is bigger, fully supports Flash (the real internet) and will beat its major competitors to the market, but one has to wonder what it’s all for in a day and age where most people are brand-conscious to the point where they’ll often turn away from something far better. We guess you have to start somewhere. 

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Tags: Bluetooth, capacitive, Flash, Flash 10.1, Fusion Garage, HD Flash, JooJoo, multi-touch, SSD, tablet, Wi-Fi

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52 Responses to “JooJoo enters production, ships this month”

1. 26
   John Ellenich says:

   February 5, 2010 at 1:07 PM

   This comment has been seriously disliked. Click here to see.

    

   Disliked.   -13

   Reply

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  eazid says:

  February 5, 2010 at 2:26 PM

  Since a large amount of the website nowadays use flash.

   

    +4

  Reply

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  Mark says:

  February 5, 2010 at 2:58 PM

  Your iPad? I didn’t know they were actually a shipping product yet. Where did you get yours from?

  The whole flash-is-the-internet-or-not discussion has been had in many places already:

  http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/blue_boxes

   

    0

  Reply

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  MobileGuru says:

  February 5, 2010 at 4:41 PM

  Im guessing that your an apple fanboy? Which means ur the brand conscious type? which also means u have money to burn?

   

    +1

  Reply
• 27
  Joe says:

  February 5, 2010 at 3:24 PM

  Boo Apple fanboys, the iPad is a GIANT miss for Apple. It is a giant iPhone and offers nothing new, I have absolutely no idea why anybody wouldn’t want this over that piece of junk. Other than blindness from the Cupertino hype machine.

   

    +1

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• 28
  iamajimm says:

  February 5, 2010 at 3:44 PM

  The ipad is basicly a content consumer;it’s mission is to take you to the istore where you can buy surprise all of the goodies there. it’s an enterainment device (with potential, I grant you). all of the behind scenes lining up of the print media should have been a big clue. crApple is taking dead aim at Amazon/Kindle, period. after that, the rest of the wwworld.

   

    0

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• 29
  Ekdizz says:

  February 5, 2010 at 6:30 PM

  I love Flash.

  No wait.

  I love HTML5.

  No wait.

  I love Flash.

  No wait.

  I love HTML5.

   

    -1

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• 30
  Bloobo says:

  February 5, 2010 at 11:27 PM

  i want a joojoo!!!!

   

    +1

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• 31
  Diabl0 says:

  February 6, 2010 at 2:38 AM

  Maybe Joojoo feels the tablet-fever that’s why they’re still pursuing the production of this device. Either way, I support them, not that I’m hoping too much, but them bringing another tablet to the table brings a new type of competition, which in somehow the users might benefit.

  ,,JooJoo: Tablet for the who details: http://bit.ly/joojoo-who-tablet

  Thanks victoria

   

    +3

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A very interesting next few months will be filled with hands on use of the iPad as well as more information (rumored) regarding Google's HTC built tablet. Wow! Technology (R)evolution is heating up in my humble opinion.

“This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done” – Steve Jobs

, referring to the soon-to-be-launched Apple Tablet.

We haven’t heard this first hand, but we’ve heard it multiple times second and third hand from completely independent sources. Senior Apple

execs and friends of Jobs are telling people that he’s about as excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet as he’s ever been. Coming from the man who has created so much, that’s saying something.

If Steve Jobs thinks the iPhone was just a warm up act to this device, I can’t wait to see what it can do. As if our expectations weren’t already set high enough. We’ll all know a lot more this Wednesday.

PC World’s Jeff Bertolucci recently posed the rhetorical question, “Could a tablet replace your notebook?” He referenced not only Apple’s anticipated tablet computer but also new PC tablets like the one from Microsoft and HP that was pitched at CES, the chatter about which inclined him to wonder if a tablet/slate would work as a suitable notebook replacement.

Bertolucci thinks that for folks who use their laptops and/or netbooks primarily for light-duty web work like email and casual surfing, the answer may be the affirmative, and of course many have pretty much switched to using their iPhones or iPod touches for that type of duty. A tablet would presumably provide a larger display size as well as greater feature depth, so for that cohort, and in that usage context, such a machine could be quite satisfactory, and a step up from the handhelds in terms of performance.

However, for those of us who do serious production work on our laptops, not so much. I’m resolved to keep an open mind, but I’m exceedingly doubtful that a tablet will be a really well-suited tool for workaday production use.

Of course there are many as yet imponderables, especially in the context of an Apple tablet, such as whether the machine will support the standard Mac OS and application software or will run with a variant of the iPhone OS, limiting one to iPhone apps, and if there will be some provision for supporting a work-worthy external keyboard and mouse, rather than limiting users to touchscreen input.

On the OS support front, recent scuttlebutt is not encouraging. Earlier, Gizmodo reported new intelligence from someone they say has been a reliable source in the past that the new tablet will be basically an “iPhone on steroids,” and will be running an ARM CPU on the iPhone kernel rather than Intel Core power with the Mac OS, so Mac OS applications will not be supported. If that is accurate information, then it would pretty much rule out the Apple tablet as a serious work platform as far as I’m concerned, and along with prognostications of a $1,000 price tag, I would say good luck with that, Apple.

If the iTablet/iSlate or whatever really is going to be an “iPhone on steroids,” that would also make prospects for external keyboard and pointing device support murky, to say the least.

I simply can’t conceive doing production work on a machine without a physical (QWERTY) keyboard. I’m only a “semi-touch” typist, but I’m pretty fast, using most of my fingers in an idiosyncratic typing technique I’ve developed over the years — part visual and party spatial reference — and I find the lack of tactile feedback with touchscreen virtual keyboarding unacceptable for typing more than a paragraph or two. Not a problem, perhaps, for tweeting and texting, but not the thing for long-form typing projects.

Both handwriting and voice dictation support could have potential. I use MacSpeech Dictate a lot for entering text both as straight dictation and for transcribing material drafted by hand. Efficient and accurate handwriting recognition could potentially condense those operations into one, but only if scribbling on the tablet proved ergonomically comfortable. My flirtations with using handwriting recognition in OS X have not been encouraging, and personally, I would miss the tactile satisfaction of putting pen to good old low-tech paper, which seems to help me organize my thoughts more effectively.

Without Mac OS support, Dictate is out (along with much else), although MacSpeech or some other developer might eventually fill that void with an iPhone OS compatible dictation app. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that. I anticipate that I’ll be using laptops as my do-all tools for years to come yet.

How about you? Can you envision a tablet, especially one running the iPhone OS, displacing your laptop?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Is The Age of the Web Tablet Finally Upon Us? and Rumored Apple Tablet: Opportunities Too Big to Ignore

Last night, during his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a prototype for a new HP Slate computer running on Windows 7. It was supposed to be an Apple-stealing moment and it was Microsoft’s moment, which is probably why Hewlett-Packard has not yet publicly mentioned that it is working on another tablet/slate computer that is running on Android. You know, Google’s mobile operating system.

HP did announce an Android-powered netbook yesterday, but that has a keyboard. A source who has seen a prototype of HP’s Android Slate says it looks just like the Windows-powered one Ballmer held last night (see image below), maybe a little smaller. “It is almost identical in every respect to the one he showed off except for the OS,” says my source.

And that, my friends, could be all the difference in the world. Already, developers have created more than 10,000 apps for Android mobile phones, and the launch of the Nexus One will keep pushing the OS into more and more hands. These apps might have to be modified for a tablet, but it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Already, a number of Android tablets are on the way from Archos, Dell, and Notion Ink. It looks like you can add HP to that list.

The bigger question that all of these Android tablets raise is what about Chrome OS? Maybe these are just stop-gaps until the Chrome Netbooks and Tablets are ready for the market.

What would you rather buy, an HP Slate that runs on Windows 7 or one that runs on Android?

(The video below is a sneak peek at the Windows HP Slate, which is where the image above is taken from):

get widgetminimize

CrunchBase Information

Android

Company:	Google
Website:	code.google.com/android

Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes… Learn More

Hewlett-Packard

Website:	hp.com
Location:	Palo Alto, California, United States

HP is a seller of computer hardware, network software, printers, and other technology and imaging products.

According to Gartner, HP is the world’s largest seller of personal computers. Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Google is working on a tablet computer with HTC, the company that built the hardware for the Nexus One “Google Phone“, according to a report.

The report claims that HTC has “been working closely with Google (

) for the past 18 months” on “several working models of a touch tablet”.

Are Google and HTC about to challenge both the iPhone and the Apple tablet, rumored to be called iSlate?

Australian news site SmartHouse, which first published the story, pits the Google/HTC offering as a direct rival to Apple’s tablet ambitions. But the device might equally prove a threat to Microsoft: getting Google Chrome OS into consumer’s hands is key to the operating system’s success.

Skeptics might argue that Google will never promote a tablet computer of its own: that would endanger its relationships with other hardware makers. And yet the Nexus One proves that Google very much will tread on toes if the move makes strategic sense.

What do you think: could a Google Tablet rival the iSlate? Or will this rumored device never see the light of day?

[image for illustration only, courtesy Gizmodo]

Apple is courting owners of US television networks, including CBS and Walt Disney, in the hope of launching a subscription television service over the internet next year, people familiar with the discussions said.

The service is expected to be offered over Apple’s iTunes digital entertainment store, which sells movies and TV shows, but does not offer them for a recurring monthly fee.

The debut of the service is among other entertainment and news services that the maker of the iPod and iPhone could offer on the “tablet” computer it is widely expected to launch imminently.

Magazine publishers Time Inc and Condé Nast have created prototype digital editions of their magazines for a new generation of handheld tablet devices from companies including Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and potentially Apple.

Apple has contacted other broadcast and cable networks, including Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting System and Viacom, which have so far been unconvinced by Apple’s proposal. The computer maker has also courted the book publishing industry, sector executives say.

“The driver behind it [the tablet] will be content,” said Kathryn Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst.

Apple is preparing an announcement next month that many anticipate will be the official unveiling of its tablet, but the company has so far declined to confirm the existence of the device. Wall Street analysts expect mass production of an Apple tablet to begin as early as February.

Executives close to the discussions fear Apple’s possible TV service could undermine the lucrative economics of the pay television industry, where basic networks such as MTV collect a fee per subscriber from distributors such as cable operators as well as selling advertising.

The business model, honed over three decades, has made cable networks one of the most resilient sectors of the media industry during the recession and was the chief reason why Comcast sought to take control of NBC Universal from General Electric this year.

Creating a new subscription service with Apple could upset distributors, these people said.

Apple was said to be offering broadcast networks $2 to $4 per subscriber and basic cable networks $1 to $2 a month, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

TV on demand about to get more affordable?