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CrunchPad Being Re-branded As JooJoo
adeelarshad82 writes to tell us that Fusion Garage seems to be ignoring the drama surrounding the "CrunchPad" and is planning to launch their "JooJoo" tablet this Friday at midnight. Unfortunately, the device will be a long way from the imagined $200 price point, weighing in at a hefty $499. "The JooJoo comes in black and has a capacitive touch screen, enough graphic power to deliver full high-definition video, offline capabilities, and a 4GB solid-state drive, though 'most of the storage is done in the cloud,' Rathakrishnan said. He promised 5 hours of battery life. In a demo during the webcast, the device powered on in about 10 seconds, and showed icons for web-based services like Twitter, Hulu, CNN, and Gmail, though the JooJoo will not come pre-loaded with any apps, Rathakrishnan said. Scroll through them with your finger as you would on the iPhone. In terms of the ownership drama, Rathakrishnan said that TechCrunch editor Arrington has created an 'incomplete and distorted story.'"
The HitlerHitler
...though 'most of the storage is done in the cloud...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The technology would have to be extra special to make up for the price point and name. JooJoo? What were they thinking?
If we're going to go with silly names, then I think they should've chosen the MoJo. That way you can "get your MoJo" or "get your MoJo working" with relative ease. It's got way more marketing potential than JooJoo.
At $200 I would be all over this (even though it sounds like it was bred from a bit of dirty business dealing). For $499, I would rather buy a laptop and have the keyboard.
I glanced at the article but didn't spot it. 2? 3? 4? Also is there really any benefit to having more than 2 cores inside a machine?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I don't see the pure tablet play working, not from JooJoo, not even from apple - it's always going to be a niche, and a small one.
The one way I can perhaps see it working is if you either build in a collapsible keyboard, or let them work with bluetooth keyboards and have some way to attach it making a kind of temporary laptop. There are just too many uses of a computer where the ability to type for long periods is needed, to get away without a real keyboard in a larger form factor. There are already netbooks with touch screens and that just seems way more practical.
JooJoo has issues outside the name though, the price point does not seem great for what it does.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People who use the phrase "price point" instead of "price" need to be shot in the head.
They were thinking about a motorized stuffed hamster.
The entire marketing drama behind all this was all a ploy. Call me crazy, but think about it: Market a new device that does some amazing stuff at a ridiculously low price. So low that you could never make a profit. Wait til all the news sites pick it up. Then stage a coup. During that coup have a takeover, and re-release the device at a sensible price under a different name. Free marketing.
Brb gotta go make a tin foil hat now.
I'm not going to touch this with a ten foot pole... and not touching the device, either.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The CrunchPad model only made sense at the low price: something inexpensive and universal.
But the low price never made sense. Apple doesn't make much money on the iPod touch, and they have all the huge economies of scale, and its still costs $200 for the 8 GB model. Add in a MUCH larger screen and bigger battery and of course the price will balloon.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Assuming Arrington really has a legitimate stake in the thing, I suggest we boycott it until Rathakrishnan cries uncle. If he has no market for it, then his 'theft' gains him nothing.
Oy vey
About localization: In some contexts "Joojoo" can be translated from Finnish as "yeah, right..".
A coincidence?
Jarjar. Meesa wanna reada book!
A Crunchpad at $299 would have been a no-brainer. A JuJu at $499 is too expensive. I'll wait for Nohrtec to come out with the Touchpad version of the Gecko laptop instead. It seems that the people behind the Juju missed the point of the Crunchpad. It was supposed to be COST REDUCED because it had no internal storage, and used the cloud for all the apps. Not, a premium cost product. Maybe Arrington will get with Nohrtec and get something like that produced.
Meant to spell JooJoo instead of JuJu. A Freudian slip perhaps?
I feel bad things for this company's future. Bad Juju, bad Mojo.
A penis.
New Economic Perspectives
...they'd never have been taken seriously with a name like CrunchPad.
I and others who develop software for people with disabilities have been looking forward to this device ever since it was announced. We need very inexpensive tools that don't require computer skills (yes, I mean any computer skills in the conventional sense). Video, text-to-speech, and animated "touch here if you want X" functionality can open up a lot of doors for some people. Yes this can be done now with an uber-cheap Linux box and a small touch screen, but many social services are, for good reason, provided in the community, on the go, wherever the person in need happens to be. This thing is a joke at $500. The only people (other than novelty buyers) who would prefer it to a netbook at that price are people who, due to a disability, can't use a netbook, and those people don't fit into business models, and they are ignored.
I do like the Fusion Garage explanation of the situation. I look forward to Arrington's response.
After Apple abandoned me and tens of thousands of other Apple ][ and ][+ owners almost thirty years ago, I have no love for those crooks. But I could get an Ipod Touch with twice as much memory at half the price and several times the battery life. At the $250 price level, the larger screen would have been worth it; at $500, no way.
I stopped at the new name...."JooJoo" I'm guessing this guy doesn't have much of an understanding at least of how naming should be done for the US.
My laptop is called a "Eee PC"... I think it's a damned stupid name, but I really like the machine...
Bow-ties are cool.
The "Cloud" is a Losers Game, stay away.
The less I have to charge a device, the less likely I am to screw up and reduce the battery capacity to nil by plugging it in a little too often.
Joo = yes in Finnish yesyes Well, at least they didn't name it "ei ei" :p
If you saw any of the video conference (live blog at http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/07/fusion-garage-crunchpad-video-conference-liveblog/), that dude even looks like a scheister.
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
Little do YOU know.
“$500 fully misappropriated, with a backbone! I said ‘That is the most expensive browser in the world’, and it doesn’t appeal to TechCrunch readers because it doesn’t have an Arrington, which makes it not a very good vaporware machine.”
I ran a video encode yesterday that happily used 100% of all four cores
Video encoding is embarrassingly parallel: each run of frames between keyframes can be given to a separate core. But a lot of workloads, like the pagination that happens whenever the user views a web page, aren't necessarily so parallel unless the user is tab-browsing.
Get Back.
because it'll prove, once and for all, that there's really no intelligent life down here.
And the new name sucks ass. Will the call the kid's version the PooPoo?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"Amongst other things that means innumerable applications a couple of clicks away in an app store."
My PC came with the crapware already loaded!
OK, how many clicked on Julie's link in hopes of finding out what she looks like?
You forgot about the fact that the slow-refreshing screen uses basically no static power. The end result is that such devices have INCREDIBLE battery life.
Over and over I hear how important this is. Why is it important?
Just how many two-week-long vacations on desert islands do you take in a year?
As a point of comparison, my phone would probably last 6-8 hours as an ebook reader, with the phone turned off and the screen backlight on. (Under most lighting conditions the backlight would be necessary to be able to read the thing...)
Now, if I were traveling, I might find myself without access to a power outlet for a substantial period of time. I could go to the airport and wait around hours, while the few outlets in the lounge are taken by people who got there before me... Or I could be on the plane itself with no access to power - or I could travel by train and be unfortunate enough to wind up on one that doesn't provide outlets. (That happened, actually, I took a train from Chicago to Colorado and didn't have an outlet. Lucky me, this also happened at the same time as my laptop battery failed...) For a trip with a daytime layover or two, that could easily turn into two or three days without access to power.
The thing is, the competition for e-book readers is nearly as small, takes no power, and, short of physical damage, never fails. It is also legible in any lighting conditions. To make an electronic device that can replace a traditional book, it needs to offer something the paper medium can't (storage, and also online access in the case of the kindle) and be designed such that its limitations as an electronic device, to the extent possible, don't diminish the experience. Battery life and legibility are especially important if you don't want it to be painfully obvious to the user that this expensive, modern technological solution to a problem that was well-addressed centuries ago carries dreadful limitations...
Low power consumption is very important for a device that seeks to act as a "better implementation of a book" - something that most people would probably argue doesn't need fixing. But more important, IMO, is that the electronic ink screens are actually very legible in all sorts of lighting conditions... Current LCD screens are very good in bright light (as long as what's being displayed is high-contrast: especially black characters on a white background) and look good in darkness, but anything in between relies on the power of the screen's built-in light: the screen has to emit the light you're going to see in those conditions, because the reflected ambient light is too easily overpowered by glare. If you're displaying color, the problem gets worse: this is why people complained so much about the original Gameboy Advance's lack of a backlight. Electronic ink screens don't have this problem so much: if there's enough light to read paper you can probably read the e-ink screen, too.
The technology is pretty raw at this point, though... The displays are great for reading, but with their slow refresh, they're pretty lousy for scanning through a book...
Bow-ties are cool.
You can't see a pure tablet working? Check out the iPod touch...
But do not forget I mentioned form factor. Simply put, keys on devices the size of the touch are not REAL keyboards. I personally prefer the virtual version on the iPhone which I can at least make larger in some cases, but can type OK as is unlike most mobile keypads (even the Blackberry I did not like though I know plenty do). So the Touch is really a pad, not a notebook...
When you get to the size of a piece of paper, it's a different device - it really is a computer, or at least people will want to use it as such with no compromise. Otherwise you have to ALSO have a computer, since you cannot do without that... if you are making a device the same size as a laptop, it has to be as fully featured as a laptop OR be incredibly specialized (e.g. Kindle).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...your fascist application of that stupid Law. I swear - you're worse than Mussolini!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Do you know how you get enough graphic power to deliver full high-definition video? You plunk down a video decoder chip.
This has no impact on your graphics performance for anything UI related.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
I hope it succeeds, only because MIchael Arrington strikes me as an arrogant and amoral prick.
How many incarnations have we seen?
- Windows for Pen - Win 3.11
- Windows 95-ME - various tablet-targetted stuffs..
- Windows XP Tablet Edition
- MacBook/Powerbook conversions
- Fujitsu Stylistic, etc..
- Vadem Clio
- iPod/Phone
- Newton
- Palm, and all subsequent handhelds of similar form factor and utility
- Nokia nSeries
- WinCE
They all strive for the same thing; the liberation of Mankind from the mechanical keyboard.
They persist for some reason, and that reason may likely be construed as justification for hardware makers to continue with the 'keyboardless PC' paradigm until the ultimate combination of human/display interaction is achieved.
With all the positive spin, I can't help but act as an advocate of Beelzebub in saying that "we won't hit bottom, and thus success, until the thing displays wireless, non-cancer-inducing video on the back side of a contact lens, with a human interface which is accessible as a neural implant.
Wake me in 2020.
you mean Jo Jo.
JooJoo was a tablet who thought he was a CrunchPad
But he knew it wouldn't last.
Jojo left his home in Southern California
For some Indian out-source-ing.
Get back, get back.
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back.
Get back to where you once belonged.
Get back JooJoo. Go home
Get back, get back.
Back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back.
Back to where you once belonged.
Get back Joo.
Get back, get back.
Get back to where you once belonged.
Apologies to McCartney, et al.
This name sure sucks. What were they thinking? Dood you got Jood. Lol!
Sounds like a wonderful investment plan...
to soak yet another bunch of little old ladies out of their pensions.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Could they come up with a more idiotic name? I sure hope they did not pay someone for than name.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
They really need to ship JooJoo with this song of JoJo.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
..a far more fitting enemy for a JoJo.
...call a disaster a "whole joojooflop situation"?
Pentax *ist. Now THAT was a stupid name.
I guess they first named it Pentax Marxist but realised it wasn't very "sales" so they replaced Marx with a wildcard.
But at least I can still tell you to go fuck yourself by using the magic reply button. Ideally, you would use something large & pointy; ramming it up yourself at least a few meters.
Oh, and I don't need to hide behind the AC veil to say this.
By the way, the same goes for whoever modded you up.
** ? x ** y is in Ada, Bash, COBOL, Fortran, FoxPro, Gnuplot, OCaml, Perl, PL/I, Python, Rexx, Ruby, SAS, ABAP, Haskell (for floating-point exponents), Turing, and VHDL, at least. Get with the times. http://wapedia.mobi/en/Exponentiation?t=11.#12.