As promised, Fusion Garage has sent out a press release regarding its Joo Joo tablet device. The news is all good: full production has started, and the device will ship this month, readily beating the iPad to market. It has also been confirmed it will come with Flash, and once Flash 10.1 goes final, the Joo Joo will be able to playback HD through Flash, so that things like Hulu will work.
Fusion Garage has teamed up with Malaysia’s CSL Group which will manufacture the Joo Joo in exchange for a “low single digit” revenue percentage. This seems like a rather low number, but hey, we’ve been surprised before.
“This is landscape changing manufacturing agreement in the CE hardware market in much the same way Dell changed the PC business model with its direct to consumer sales approach back in the 1990s,” said Fusion Garage founder and CEO, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, “CSL’s confidence in JooJoo and strategic investment enables us to concentrate on the expansion of our organization, software development and, ultimately, building a world class CE company.”
“We are justifiably bullish – not only on the promise of the JooJoo and the Internet tablet market’s potential but also on Fusion Garage’s forward looking vision,” said Dato Eric Chuah, Chairman of the CSL Group, “We have an opportunity to expand our business via this relationship, enter a hot market with a trusted partner and turn the traditional CE hardware manufacturing model on its head. We are betting on volume here and firmly believe our bet will be a winner.”
Basically all the Joo Joo needs for me to be considered useful is to have the ability to browse SAMBA shares; I keep all my media content on the media centre in my bedroom, and if I could access all that through the Joo Joo then it would be a good media player – albeit an expensive one at USD 499. Since it runs Linux, chances are people will start hacking it and expanding its functionality, probably in a legal way, as opposed to the iPad which will be illegal to hack.
Looks like a very cool device. Would be interesting to see how the reviews pair up against the iPad as this machine looks better (spec wise).
The only thing this machine lacks (as far as I can tell from the website) is the slick 3D OS features the iPad has. As mentioned these features could of course be added by hackers
What specs are you looking at?
Looking at
https://thejoojoo.com/sites/specification
and
http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
The Ipad has twice the battery life and a physically larger screen, but less pixels (1366 x 768 joo joo vs 1024 x 768 ipad).
If the Ipad were more open, it would be a no brainier for me. Or conversely if the Joo Joo was created by a more ethical company, then it would win out. But as it is, I think I’ll just update my mac book. Slates would be cool, but I need the keyboard.
Well, according to those sites, ipad have a 9.7-inch (diagonal) diplay and joojoo 12.1 inchs. So joojoo’s screen is larger.
So the iPad already has twice the battery life and this thing supports Flash, which on Linux (and OSX) almost generates a core breech in the processor. Watching 1080p movies will be interesting then – you might get through the credits before the battery gasps its dying breath…
They specifically mention flash 10.1, which is supposed to bring many performance enhancements including better hardware acceleration for things like H.264 video. Adobe’s literature also makes great mention of improvements on mobile devices, so perhaps it won’t destroy the battery life all that much after all.
Only 4GB RAM? I hope there’s an external slot for more storage.
Hopefully there’s good competition in this space to keep innovation rich and hopefully “force” Apple to drop being so restrictive.
All we need is Google to launch gPad.. or GooGoo..
Doesn’t it sound like this one already run chromeos?
Fine device, but what has contaminated OSAlert?
Some kind of “Gadget Flue”?
I also dislike the use of the term “innovation” with these gadgets, phones, and whatnot. It is more about consumerism, I think.
I have contaminated OSAlert. With unicorns and rainbows and happiness.
Can’t you feel the love? Feel it, damnit!
You probably have an overflow in you consumer electronics buffer.
You should have used strncpy.
The emergence of the tablet sector after so many years of false starts, and the adaptation of existing OSes and the creation of new ones to serve it will be the biggest thing to happen to the OS world in ten years. If this isn’t “OS News” then what is?
I wonder also how “open” is “open”…
As we have seen, being based on Linux is by no means a guarantee that something is open.
Unlike the Linux community and the GPL advocates, I consider something as “open” when there is freely available quality documentation about both the hardware and the software. At least the Joo Joo website fails miserably at this.
Edited 2010-02-04 11:06 UTC
Well that eliminated just about all the Linux distributions out there.
Edited 2010-02-04 11:09 UTC
Heh, while in essence that’s true, it was not quite what I was after.
Thom hoped that being Linux based will lure hackers to add functionality and so on. But as there is a new gadget every month and the silicon is moving so fast, at least I won’t be the one who wastes time coding (or reverse engineering) undocumented hardware (or software, to lesser extent).
And no, it doesn’t make it open if there is some FTP server somewhere that contains the GPL’ed bits, full of magic constants.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/
http://www.debian.org/doc/
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml
http://www.slackbook.org/
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
http://en.tldp.org/
Edited 2010-02-04 13:18 UTC
Ehm. If I want to write code for hardware, how does documentation for Linux distributions help me?
I may have missed something here, but how would hacking your own iPad be illegal? DMCA?
Yes, the DMCA (which is idiotic beyond belief) prevents you from using your own device however you want to.
It just goes to show how messed up the legal system is, where big companies can simply pay for new laws…
The tech specs on the web page make no mention at all about the CPU. Is it ARM-based, x86 or something else entirely? My guess would be ARM, but which one? Snapdragon, OMAP, Armada and Tegra are all possible contenders.
“Browser-based OS” is not very informative either.
It’s a VIA Nano CPU inside. So it’s X86 compatible and could run Windows.
Being able to hack something is far different from it being legal. The only obligation that they have is releasing the source code for any modifications they have made to the kernel and whatever bits make up the rest.
The question still remains on how will we be able to load up a custom OS onto it, if at all. Also without any kind of specs and documentation hacking on this thing will interesting.
But lets wait and see what kind of moddable support they have before getting all worked up about it.
If this thing runs Linux, as long as you can install NFS & portmap, you should be able to do whatever you want. I mean, you do have a Linux/BSD server and not a Windows box for a server, right?
At the risk of going a bit OT I nonetheless feel compelled to mention that some people (myself included) find NFS to be a bit of a PITA compared to Samba, which is actually very well supported & easy to set up on Linux. Consider that you also get free & easy Windows interoperability for the household’s MS lusers as well and it does actually make a reasonable choice sometimes
If this pad doesn’t come with Samba support out of the box, it should be fairly straightforward to add it if the thing’s even the least bit hackable. If it’s not, well then it’s hardly worth buying anyway
Hopefully this pad will run long enough if with or w/o a customized OS… But I doubt it.
Anyone of instant links to videos of it in action? Or more in depth info?
Now that you can get decent data plans for 3g, an expensive device such as this should have GSM/GPRS/3G built in.
Also, what about the screen? Is it a sunlight readable one?
You can get decent 3G data plans ? In the US? What do you consider to be decent?
I am not from the US, but surely you must have some kind of high speed wireless data plans?
In germany you can buy a umts/hdspa data flat rate for about 20 EUR per month. So obviously any mobile gadget that does not come with 3G connectivity is kind of pointless.
It’s not the plans themselves that are the problem here in the US, it’s the fact that coverage is relatively poor no matter what provider you go with. You can get an unlimited 3g plan for $25-$30/month USD from most major wireless carriers. Trouble is, no matter which carrier you go with, you won’t have coverage everywhere and chances are if you don’t have coverage in a specific area, someone else on another carrier will have coverage *there* but if they were to go back to where you live, they would have no coverage on their carrier. It’s the same situation for cel coverage too. All the carriers have their regions where they’re strong, but if you’re outside of those regions chances are you get zero signal whatsoever.
Luxury, luxury!
By comparison, Rogers Wireless in Canada provides 2GB data transfer/month for $80/month. And last I checked, that’s an especially good deal (by their standards) that’s only available to iPhone customers.
Wow. I want to move to Germany.
In Argentina, 200MB/month costs $100, which is U$S26, which is more or less ^a`not19. Each additional MB is very expensive.
Flat* is only available for iPhones at $149 (^a`not28)
In either case, you can’t *legally* do tethering
* 3GB/month (after 3GB your speed is reduced to 128Kbps)
They actually came up with a name worse than the ipad.
So does this mean that Apple’s war against tinkerers has been temporarily averted? Perhaps the headline should contain a more sensationalist title like Joo Joo tablet joins the alliance against the evil Apple forces who plan total enslavement of tinkerers.
Apple will face greater competition with tablet devices since they aren’t tied to a carrier. There are a lot of people that want a portable device for cafe and bedroom surfing but would not pay $500, especially when you can get a good notebook for $350.
….because NOBODY would spend another 150$ more then the competition for an apple product
I never said it wouldn’t sell. Don’t put words in my mouth.
But I would say that the majority would rather buy a $350 notebook than a $500 tablet, regardless of brand. That leaves a lot of room for competitors. A $200 tablet could really do well.
And that’s Flash, and maybe the camera (and from the rumors, that’s probably a short term advantage).
Other than that, it’s thicker, heavier, bigger, 1/4 storage of the base iPad, no 3G option (perhaps through the USB port), 1/2 the run time.
iPad costs the same, may well be faster (don’t know the CPU specs), and the iPad has “140,000 apps” on the AppStore, as well as iTunes and iBooks. So, it’s got a boatload of content readily available.
iPad also has a large network of walk in service and support centers.
Bad timing to be here when the 800lb gorilla enters the room.
Geeks may buy this. VARs making vertical apps may buy this. But it’s not a compelling package right now for consumers, save for Flash. And I don’t think that’s enough to carry it.
I don’t understand why a device with a 12″ screen and 1366 x 768 resolution needs to support 1080p, it’s not like it would be noticeable. I have a 42″ TV at home that only does 720p and it looks great to me.
I agree 100%. There’s only one reason for a small-screen device to support 1080p, and that’s “buzzword compliance.”
I second that. What good is the 1080p support if the display can barely support 720p?
If you have a 1080p movie available it would be nice if the device could play it scaled down without stutter.
Although 720p looks nice enough on my computer scaled up a bit.
Except for the rest of the world…
I am dumbfounded that no one has mentioned CruchPad or TechCrunch in any of the comments. Did every one of you forget what happened just a few months ago? Does no one care about Honer and what’s Right any more? JooJoo can go blow it out their digital arses. I for one will never ever touch a piece of technology of theirs after their total disregard of Michael Arrington. And I would hope other would feel the same. Your just asking for trouble when you buy a product from a vendor that’s already proved their low character.