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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."
I could drive to the Apple Store during the time it takes to say that guy's name.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Googling doesn't really turn up any behind the scenes account of this story. What really happened? Somehow, Arrington's version of the story smells a lot like half-truths. If there are any insiders reading the /. comments, there's no need to wait for VH1 to come out with a crappy new show about the background behind failed business ventures, where comedians past the peak of their career work furiously to humorize angry chat logs and second rate re-enactments, go ahead and blab it all anonymously here... Oh, also, if VH1 is reading and you like that idea; just remember where it came from. We'll call it 'behind the silicon valley business deals', then we'll send me a royalty check.
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
Our company was one of those preorders. We were testing our product on lots of different tablets. We received the JooJoo, saw what a piece of garbage it was, and returned it for a full refund.
Not really. Joo Joo was a major innovation in spectacular Apple competitor fiascoes.
This wasn't a case of somebody showing up with a crappy styrofoam boogie board long after the wave had passed. This was management realizing they had their crappy styrofoam board in about the right place in time to catch the wave, then drowning as they experienced a giant greed orgasm.
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JooJoo Tablet Dies, Fusion Garage
Sorry to hear that. Fusion Garage was in the middle of recording a new CD. Still, I think another drummer could fill in.
I'll take a crack at it. In a nutshell, the hardware to do tablets has been around for some time, but not a user interface that makes the idea of a tablet really work.
Did you ever learn to ice skate? If you haven't, just bear with me and I'll think you'll see what I mean. Before you try skating, you see people zooming around on the ice. Some of them are skating backwards, others are weaving in and out of the other skaters, and you think, "that looks like fun." Then you strap on the skates and find out that for *you*, it's all falling on your ass and barely being able to move at all and that not necessarily in the direction you want to go, mind you.
Now tablet UIs are all about direct manipulation. You grab things and move them around. It's supposed to be intuitive. It's not supposed to have weird quirks that you have to work your way around. What people expect when they buy a tablet is the equivalent of a pair of magic skates that allow them to skate like an Olympic champion just by putting them on. As the UI designer, you've got to eliminate the learning curve, smooth over the bumps, take care of all the fiddly muscle-memory kind of thing that user's can't put into words (but they can describe the results of lacking it: you fall on your ass).
That means you really have to re-think the interface from the ground-up for people who will be manipulating things directly on-screen.
But what the market *got* was Windows with touchscreen drivers. It was the kind of thing that makes sense in the abstract. The Windows rationale has been its huge library of apps and a user base who'd already bought those apps. The value proposition was not self-consistent: all the same old software you are used working the same way it always has ... but with a tablet UI.
I have a Windows 7 convertible tablet/netbook. A few apps that take over the screen and were built from the ground up as tablet apps work just fine. But trying to use apps designed for *Windows* has all the suckage any Microsoft hater could hope for. It's almost the worst case UI scenario. It works *just enough* that you're tempted to try it, then the damned thing dumps you on your ass.
Apple did a great job of bootstrapping their tablet with the iPhone an iPod Touch. People didn't expect a platform with a huge app library, they were delighted to use them for Apple's own touch enabled apps. Then once there was a reasonable third party app library they introduced a tablet, and never bothered worrying about getting MacOS apps to work with a touch UI, which would have sucked no matter how brilliant they tried to be.
I think we'll see some credible Android tablets soon. It's still not easy to do a good touch interface, but nobody is trying to make legacy UI apps work.
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Archos releases products WAY before they are done.
I guess the neat thing about Android is that you can do their debugging for them!
From the Archos 101 site:
"The ARCHOS 101 internet tablet is a tablet who's choice you'll be proud of."
WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?