JooJoo: the web-only touch-screen tablet

Can anyone stop the iPad crushing all competition in the fledgling market for wireless tablets? Perhaps the best way to compete is to release a model that's genuinely different and much less expensive, of course. Enter the JooJoo, a tablet that manufacturer Fusion Garage hopes will prove a serious alternative to the Apple. We got to have a go with one yesterday, so read on to find out exactly what we thought of it.


It almost never happened. The release date kept being put back, back and back again, but the JooJoo (apparently pronounced 'YouYou') has finally hit Europe. Plenty of sites are reporting rumours of poor JooJoo sales stateside (said to be somewhere in the region of 100 units!) so Fusion Garage is almost certainly hoping it will meet more success in Europe. At £319, the JooJoo is a fair bit cheaper than the upcoming iPad Wi-Fi 16 GB. So what exactly does £319 get you? The JooJoo tablet has a 12.1-inch multi-touch touch-screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It has a 4 GB internal memory, a USB port, a headphones socket and a webcam. The Linux-based interface is all new and was developed by Chandrasekhar Rathakrishnan, the company's Indian CEO. The operating system is also compatible with Java and Flash. Although an application store is set to be developed in the coming months, the CEO is adamant that the JooJoo is primarily 'a window onto the web. We already have an App Store: it's called the Internet'.

It's all about the web

We got to have a play around with a JooJoo yesterday, so let's see whether it's worth the investment. Start-up is fast at under 10 seconds. There's no point testing how it can be held in one hand—this is already troublesome enough with the iPad, so it's not likely to be any easier with a tablet that's just as big but both thicker and heavier (1.1 kg). The interface is pleasant enough with icons that are created when you bookmark favourite sites. You can even view your icons by category, such as Entertainment, Social, News etc.

Web pages were fast to load in spite of the weak Wi-Fi signal during out test session. You use two fingers to scroll vertically (see the end of our video, below). If you scroll down with one finger, the JooJoo bar appears, allowing you to flick between web pages, go back to the homepage or bring up the keyboard. The keyboard is responsive if a little on the small side. Plus, like on the Palm Pre, you can display all the web pages you've got open and then 'throw' them back up to the top of the screen to get rid of them.




You can't zoom in on pages, but Chandrasekhar Rathakrishnan assured us that an update is currently in the pipeline. Then we had a go at playing a Flash game. The game did run on the tablet but the keyboard made it tricky to play properly. In fact, I'd forget using it for games for the moment. Anyway, Fusion Garage could always develop an update to move to Adobe Air if necessary.

As it is, the JooJoo is mainly attractive for its lower-than-Apple price. Note that it also has a lower battery life than the iPad, advertised as just 5 hours. This web-oriented tablet does its job just fine but its size and weight make it a bit cumbersome to use.

Until an agreement can be reached with distributors, the JooJoo will only be available to buy on the product website.



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