Fusion Garage JooJoo

In spite of a string of troublesome delays (see insert), the JooJoo was finally launched on 12 May 2010, a good two weeks before the iPad. The JooJoo has now finally landed in our offices and has been put through its paces in our test lab. Regular readers of DigitalVersus will no doubt have already come across our adventures with Fusion Garage's touch-screen tablet in the JooJoo Diaries. You may therefore already have some idea of what the product's like and whether it's worth the investment. The Singapore-based manufacturer's tablet is being marketed as a touch-screen 'window onto the web', and that means all web too thanks to integrated Flash compatibility. It runs a Linux-based operating system that's been optimised for hands-on navigation and has a 4 GB internal memory plus a webcam, but no SD card reader.


Currently, the tablet is only available to buy on the JooJoo website, and on top of the £319 you pay for the tablet, you'll have to fork out an extra £15 for shipping. What they don't tell you, though, is that there's an additional £62 to pay in customs duty. That pushes the total cost of buying a JooJoo up to £396. Is it worth it? Let's take a look.

Design & Handling

With its 12.1-inch glossy screen, gold-tinted matte casing and outsized dimensions, the JooJoo tablet is a sight to behold. It may look impressive, but you'll soon have second thoughts when you pick the thing up, as there's just no getting round the fact that the plastic imitation aluminium clearly isn't aluminium. The tablet is big, and is probably a bit too big to use comfortably for long or even moderate amounts of time. The ON/OFF button needs reworking too, as it's tricky to press unless you have long enough nails.

Handling the JooJoo is instinctive, as one hand fits nicely on either side of the screen. The black border isn't touch-sensitive, and at 2.5 to 3.5 cm wide (depending on the position), it's thicker than the iPad's screen frame so you won't have to worry about accidentally clicking things with overshooting fingers.

The JooJoo's weight quickly becomes a problem, as at 1.1 Kg this tablet weighs as much as a MacBook Air or a small laptop. As it's a tablet though, you have to take most of that weight in your hands and arms. Fear not though, as Fusion Garage does offer a custom JooJoo stand for an additional £30. Without it, you'll find your arms and wrists quickly get tired. Especially when you have to keep letting go of one side of the tablet to navigate with the other hand.

When used vertically, in portrait mode, the JooJoo rests naturally with its edge on your stomach or legs, although, it's still a little too big to use comfortably. Plus, the JooJoo gets quite hot, really quite hot in fact, especially under the battery (a small patch under your left hand). Another drawback for anyone, like me, who has large hands, is that the thumb of your left hand naturally rests on top of the light sensor. That means that unless you deactivate the light-sensor function, the screen will keep going dark. Users with smaller hands won't find that a problem though.

There's a webcam at the top of the tablet, but this can only be used for videoconferencing via certain specific platforms. Plus, for the moment at least, the USB port is deactivated, making it more or less useless except for changing the JooJoo's OS (see the Interface section below) or hooking up a wired mouse or keyboard.

The Screen

The screen is a 12.1-inch TN panel with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels and an ultra-glossy finish. The JooJoo screen displays a perfectly good image when you're in front of the tablet and facing it straight on. Viewing angles are nice and wide in landscape mode. However, as it's a TN panel, the screen's vertical viewing angles leave something to be desired. From around 45°, the top part of the screen starts to look like a photo negative and the bottom goes dark. That won't cause too much of a problem in landscape mode, but it becomes a little more frustrating when you hold the JooJoo vertically.



As the JooJoo is best used facing straight at the screen, it's not so good if several users are trying to read at once. Reflections and screen glare are comparable to the iPad. In other words, you'll have no trouble doing your hair in the JooJoo screen, and you'll an even larger surface to do it with. Adjusting the backlighting won't work miracles either, but it will help get rid of a few brighter reflections. The screen really is incredibly shiny—beaming almost—and also gives off a staggering amount of heat after around one hour's use.

Interface & Navigation

Although a Linux-based operating system is usually synonymous with a light and easy-going kind of operation, that certainly isn't the case with the JooJoo. The interface developed specially for the tablet may be Linux-based, but the Intel Atom processor clocked at 1.6 Ghz and the Nvidia Ion graphics processor seriously struggle to keep things running smoothly. The interface ticks over at a constantly sluggish pace.

The JooJoo homescreen displays twenty-or-so icons, which are direct links to sites including Facebook, Twitter, CNN, Hulu, Pandora, Amazon, Wordpress, Gmail, The Weather Channel, Yahoo! BBC News, FlickR and YouTube. You can choose to display them all or select certain categories of site (social networking, news, business, entertainment etc.).

The homescreen also offers access to the tablet's rather short settings menu. Just swipe your finger to the left to access your bookmarks or flick it to the right to bring up the calendar and browsing history. Graphically, at least, these pages are a shining example of just how well certain features really can be adapted to touch-screen control on a tablet. In practice, however, it's a different story. The interface really takes the shine off internal navigation, as it seems to continually get stuck when you try to change page or scroll through icons. In fact, don't expect smooth, flowing navigation anywhere in the JooJoo's internal menus.

A major feature of the interface is the JooJoo bar, which you can bring up simply sliding your finger down towards the bottom of the screen, anywhere on the tablet. The JooJoo bar offers access the menu, the on-screen keyboard, the volume settings, the web page carousel for flicking between pages, or, by pressing the blank space in the middle of the bar, a web address bar that can also be used to search for sites.
As the gesture used to bring up the JooJoo bar can't be user-modified, you'll have to learn to scroll vertically in web pages with two fingers instead of one. Also note that the display will only change from a vertical to horizontal position when you turn the JooJoo round clockwise.

Another one of the JooJoo's charming idiosyncrasies is that when you plug the tablet in to charge (which you'll find yourself doing quite often, as we'll see below), nine times out of ten the touch-screen stops responding. Only the screen rotation function carries on working. Some client feedback has pointed to an electrical earthing issue, but in any case, it's still a pretty unforgivable design flaw.

It is possible to install other operating systems on the JooJoo, such as Mac OSX or Windows 7, by connecting an optical disc drive to the USB port. However, we haven't tried doing this as our aim here is to test the JooJoo as supplied by the manufacturer. For those of you who are interested, word on the web is that both of the aforementioned OS run with greater stability than the original OS supplied. Plus, with Windows 7 the battery life actually improves. Could there be any greater proof of the JooJoo interface's shoddy design?

Keyboard & Text Entry

You can bring up the on-screen QWERTY keyboard by pressing the corresponding icon on the JooJoo bar. It also pops up when you press on a text entry box. In landscape mode the overall experience feels very similar to using an iPad.

The keyboard is nice and big, and there's plenty of room between the keys. The screen is very responsive too, or at least when the tablet's OS allows it to be. The semi-transparent keyboard is displayed over the top of whatever you're looking at on-screen, and you can move it around freely on the screen by simply dragging and dropping it.

Unfortunately, it's not a full keyboard with letters, numbers and symbols. What's more, when the tablet's in the vertical position, the keyboard shrinks down half as wide and typing becomes a little more problematic.

Use

As the JooJoo is designed for surfing the web, it theoretically has as many uses as the web itself allows. As all its activities are web-based, this tablet is highly dependent on a Wi-Fi connection. Without it, in fact, it's pretty much useless. Note that there's an integrated 3G chip, but for the moment it doesn't actually do anything.

Multimedia

YouTube, with its two billion videos played each and every day, is probably the jewel in the JooJoo's crown, as the site's videos are effectively optimised for viewing on the tablet. You can access the site directly via the JooJoo YouTube icon on the homescreen, and just to remind you how very well suited they are to each other, you'll see the JooJoo logo flash up before each YouTube video you watch.
Just press on the video of your choice, wait a short time for the video to buffer (it's really quite quick, even for HQ high-quality videos) and the video is displayed in full-screen format on the 12.1-inch display. The extrapolation is really good too, and only a few videos maintain the 4:3 aspect ratio.



It's a shame this kind of inter-operability hasn't been extended to other sites, like Dailymotion, which has more trouble loading up similar videos (in SD or in HD). The JooJoo can't play DivX or other kinds of video files, and you can't load files onto the tablet. Streaming is a bit of a gamble ... and, to be honest, you'll probably lose more often than you'll win. For music, just connect to your favourite music site like Deezer or Last.fm and hit play. Both videos and music will keep running in the background if you leave the page open, so you can go off and surf in a different window without losing your chosen soundtrack.

E-Book Reader

As there's no internal e-reader application, you'll have to make do with content available online, such as the books and magazines in Google Books. Reading is pleasant in the portrait position, but beware of small fonts as there's no zoom function. Fusion Garage is once again assuring users that this function will be coming soon.

Games

Since the tablet is strictly web-only, the only games you'll be able to play are online Flash games. One really great thing about the JooJoo is that it is compatible with Flash, and should be adopting Air in the not-too-distant future as well. However, even though all Flash games are indeed compatible with the JooJoo, the on-screen keyboard doesn't have any arrow keys.



You'll therefore have to hunt down the few Flash games that don't require directional controls. You might also want to keep the JooJoo in the vertical position, as the keyboard takes up way too much room when you use it horizontally.

Internet

Web browsing with the JooJoo is fast, and for those of you Wi-Fi N, online navigation will be very fast indeed. A real strong point of the JooJoo is that it can display websites in their entirety. Whole internet pages on a tablet with no bits missing? That's certainly new! In fact, with Flash on board, the internet is your oyster. The 4 GB internal memory is effectively used as a buffer memory, and allows the tablet to display information quickly and juggle several things at once, as internet multitasking poses no real problem to the JooJoo. You can therefore open several pages at once then leave them open and active with no real impact on browsing performances. A spin-round carousel menu is also on hand for moving between pages.



For the moment it's not possible to make your own icons for direct access to favourite pages, but that's another thing Fusion Garage says is coming soon. There is, however, a bookmark system in the JooJoo browser for marking pages.

Work

To actually work on the JooJoo, you'll have to use online solutions like Google Documents and online e-mail accounts. Also, the JooJoo doesn't offer predictive text entry (for the moment?).

Applications

As it says on the tablet's official website 'JooJoo has the largest app store in the world. It's called the Internet. [...] Why waste time with watered down apps when you can have the real thing?' That's a pretty bold declaration, and although we like their provocative approach to the competition, there's no denying that applications are the big thing right now in all kinds of portable devices. Applications are a major selling point, and are almost certainly a key area of future development for brands like Apple and Google. In this respect, we reckon that launching a tablet with no mobile application system was a bit of a strategic error for Fusion Garage. It also seems like a bit of a strange choice when the custom JooJoo interface is clearly trying to replicate the kind of OS and operation you'd typically find in a smartphone.

Battery Life


The JooJoo takes between 2¼ and 2½ hours to charge. That's better than The Other Tablet, which takes nearer 3 hours. We put it to the test sending e-mails with Gmail, watching clips on YouTube, surfing on Facebook and generally mooching around in the OS. One hour later, the battery level was already at 60%. After putting the JooJoo down for a while and picking it up a little while later, it had guzzled 18% more of its battery. After playing some more, nothing too crazy, just bog-standard stuff, the JooJoo finally gave up the ghost after 2 hours 50 minutes, and without really having been put through its paces..

Here's the trick: I noticed that if you put the JooJoo down for a while, it seems to put itself on standby. Don't be fooled though, as even if the screen goes off, you actually have to half-press the On/Off button to send it into a real standby mode. Then, with a similar kind of not-too-strenuous use, but cleverly remembering to put the tablet into its real standby mode, I managed to keep the JooJoo running for 3 hours 40 minutes ... but that's without cranking the screen brightness up to the max. When used continually, battery life varies from 2 hours 20 minutes to 2 hours 40 minutes. That's around 6 hours less than the iPad!

The Verdict

The JooJoo is too big to be easy or comfortable to use, even when sitting on the sofa, and is too heavy to hold for long periods of time. It's also useless unless connected to the web, which somewhat limits its actual utility. And then there's the battery life, although I guess that's what happens when you squeeze a netbook into an oversized touch-screen casing. Fusion Garage is obviously thinking about bringing other types of use to the JooJoo, as there is a USB port. However, for the moment (there's that key phrase again), it can only be used to connect USB peripherals or to replace the OS (which is apparently worth the effort). Plus, at £396, the total cost of a 4 GB JooJoo isn't really that far off the £429 you'd pay for a 16 GB Wi-Fi iPad. Enough said really.