Whither the JooJoo?

mac voyermac voyer
Posted:
in iPhone edited January 2014
As I type this post on my iPad, I wonder about the first, would be iPad killer. I have heard no news about it since it's release. It seems the HP Slate is not winning the heart of the first person who got their hands on one. Still, the JooJoo was the first out of the gate. Where is it now?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    Read reviews, particularly the one on Engadget. It was terrible. Flash was broken, the interface sucks. The only think this thing is killing is itself.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    shrikeshrike Posts: 494member
    In late February, it was rumored that Fusion Garage had 90 pre-orders (yes, just one zero) and 15 of the 90 were cancelled. They probably got a few more after they revealed the revised UI. Engadget and Wired reviewed it. They were as nice as possible in murdering the device.



    Essentially, it's a 2008 era netbook with Linux (remember netbooks used to ship with Linux in the beginning), but with a 12" screen and only limited to web-browsing. Since Flash is just as unoptimized for Linux as it is for Mac OS X, the JooJoo could only play Flash video in-browser at lower bit-rates. With larger or fullscreen video it stuttered and cut its battery time to about 2.5 hours, half of the advertised battery time. In fact it was bad enough that Fusion Garage implemented a hack to play "Flash video". When playing Flash-wrapped H.264 video, they extracted the H.264 video and played it as a H.264 video instead of going through the Flash player. Adobe quickly distanced themselves from the JooJoo after being questions about the Flash performance on the JooJoo.



    Anyways, Fusion Garage was always going to be a very very very small player. How anyone could think otherwise was crazy. Think about it. They are using a year-old Atom architecture. This meant any reasonably thin and light JooJoo would have had poor battery life on the order of 2 to 3 hours (think netbook with 3 cell batteries). They used custom modified Linux and can't take advantage of the app cache of Android or Windows. They limited the device to only web browsing. Their one advantage of being able to run Flash turned out to be liability - this was obvious as Flash is unoptimized on Linux, just like Mac OS X. They had no content deals. They have no marketing.



    Even the HP Slate won't be like the iPad, as the Slate is just a side business to HP, while Apple basically put all of its energies in making the iPad as great as possible. Just like with "smartphones", Google will be Apple's biggest competitor as they will be shameless in copying as much of the iPad as possible in addition to their killer business proposition to OEMS: advertising revenue sharing for using Android and ChromeOS.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    mac voyermac voyer Posts: 1,295member
    I found, and read the Engadget review while laying in bed. I also read the statements from Adobe. My first thought after reading all that was that Mike Arrington should be thanking his lucky stars those clowns took this turd of a device off his hands. Adobe also should be ashamed as they cannot point to one mainstream mobile device running Flash of which they are proud. Every time Adobe opens their mouth or a competitor releases a product, Apple looks smarter and smarter.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mac Voyer View Post


    As I type this post on my iPad, I wonder about the first, would be iPad killer. I have heard no news about it since it's release. It seems the HP Slate is not winning the heart of the first person who got their hands on one. Still, the JooJoo was the first out of the gate. Where is it now?



    Was the JooJoo really first?



    Unless i'm missing something, it was just one in a long, looooong line of tablets which never sold well. Honestly, is there something i'm missing?
  • Reply 5 of 7
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    Plus it has a stupid name. I mean, Joojoo? Sounds like what a toddler calls his juice box.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    mac voyermac voyer Posts: 1,295member
    So has the Joojoo just rolled up somewhere and died, or is it still selling?
  • Reply 7 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,515moderator
    I think the hardware looked quite nice - certainly nicer than the HP Slate - and the demo of it running Windows 7 seemed pretty smooth:



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLzp_xEN1ak



    If they marketed it with Android, it might take off but I think a Windows 7 tablet like in the demo would appeal to a lot of people. You can always attach a wireless mouse/keyboard if you really need to.



    The touch interaction with the UI looked clumsy at times but that's mainly Microsoft's fault for not reworking the UI enough into a touch UI. Menu systems need to work differently like when you tap on one, it should do something like expand to the full height of the screen and slide up and down but with the text really big.
Sign In or Register to comment.