JooJoo Tablet Dies, Fusion Garage Continues On

vanstinator writes "Due to heavy competition from the iPad and a less-than-stellar entrance into the market, Fusion Garage today released a statement saying that the JooJoo tablet is no more." Company founder Chandrashekar Rathakrishnan says that the company will move forward, but hasn't provided much information about future products. According to Geek.com, "The JooJoo has had a short life and will be remembered more for the fighting it caused between Fusion and Michael Arrington than anything else. It started life as the CrunchPad and a collaboration between Arrington and Fusion Garage. Then Fusion cut Arrington out of the picture, the name was changed to JooJoo and the price increased from $200 to $500."

Comments

Re:Where's the post mortem on this.

[mspohr]

This was a project by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch to create $200 tablet like the iPad that was started in 2008 (long before even rumors of an Apple tablet) that generated a lot of hype, a few prototypes and eventually (after a pubic brawl) some actual shipping products (which apparently weren't very good).

Original announcement of the project:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/

Prototype A:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/update-on-the-techcrunch-tablet-prototype-a/

Prototype B:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-update-prototype-b/

After this, the story gets murky. According to Arrington, his "partners" (Rathakrishnan - Fusion Garage) changed their mind and decided that they wanted to cut him out of the project. Who knows what really happened.

Some commentary here: http://gawker.com/5415320/the-sad-premature-death-of-the-techcrunch-tablet

and here

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/TechCrunch-CrunchPad-Dead-Chandra-Rathakrishnan,9174.html