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Bad juju for JooJoo?
March 31, 2010 | 8:15 am
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By Chris Meadows
There have been some rumors going around in the last day or so concerning the number of pre-orders for the JooJoo, which was due to ship on Monday. Someone leaked a court document (PDF) purporting to show that only 90 units had been pre-ordered as of February 11th, and 15 of those orders had been cancelled.
Of course, it has been a month and a half since then—ample time for more orders to be placed. However, the relatively low number even at that early date—if true—is a pretty bad sign.
Though the JooJoo’s technical specs are superior to the iPad’s in a number of ways, including the ability to show 720P high-definition video at full native resolution, it suffers from the double-whammy of launching 1) amid the legal imbroglio surrounding Fusion Garage’s sudden and inimical split with TechCrunch, and 2) at the same time as an Apple device occupying much the same niche.
Either one of those problems by itself would be off-putting, but together they’re downright intimidating. No matter how nice the hardware might seem, potential buyers can’t help but look at a company in that situation and wonder whether it will be around to service and support the product in six months’ time.
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Tech Specs of the JooJoo that I like: the 12″ screen. I’ve been sizing comics pages at the iPad 9.7″ screen size, and they just don’t seem big enough. Actually 12″ isn’t quite big enough either, but it’s better.
But for the rest of it, alas, JooJoo mark 1 falls far short of the iPad, even technically: the Atom processor eats up battery life a lot more than any ARM SOC. (I guess that the JooJoo was designed to go out before the new ARM chips became available?)
And the software is only a browser. Think about that for ebooks. You can read Project Gutenberg books online. You can read Munsey’s books online. You can read Scrbd texts online. And I suppose if you wanted to go to all the trouble, you could upload your scans and OCRs to your own webpage and read them online, or put them on your private Google Docs.
Would Amazon ever create a Kindle page to read your Kindle books online, just through a browser logged into your account?
JooJoo is a problem not only because of the iPad, and not only because of the litigation surrounding its creation and rights, but also because of the wave of ARM-based slates coming, many, no doubt, like Notion Ink’s Adam, with Nvidia Tegra 2 chipsets.
The Crunchpad concept was always just for browsing and online work at the couch. Ebooks were always a stretch for the concept.
— asotir
You need a 14.5-inch screen to show A4-tall & letter-wide printed material full size. Round up and call it a 15-inch diagonal on 4:3 ratio 9×12-inch screen. My notebook screen is 16:9 at 17.3 inches, which turns out to be 8.5 by 15 inches. Nice for reading comics when held sideways in book-mode. I’ve often wished the screen could be detached as a tablet for the many times I use it without requiring a keyboard.