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Fusion Garage Going After Lower-Price Tablet Market
nk497 writes "Fusion Garage has dropped the price of its follow-up to the JooJoo tablet, cutting the Grid10's price by $200 to $299 in the US and £259 in the UK. Outspoken CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan has clearly been following the HP TouchPad fire sale, and noticed the importance of price when it comes to taking on Apple's iPad. He said there's no point in buying 'a poor carbon copy' of the Apple tablet for the same price. 'At $499, why would you buy — it's like going to China and buying a [fake] Louis Vuitton bag, at the same price as the real Louis Vuitton bags. It doesn't make sense, when you know it's a rip-off product,' he said."
Isn't this the same guy and company that ripped off the CrunchPad from Michael Arrington?
I think the court case is proceeding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo
After that sold only a few hundred units, they ditched the name and came out with a new tablet. The UI seems interesting, but I don't think this is going to sell many units.
This space for rent.
...Did he just say *his* product was a "poor carbon copy" and a "rip-off"?
Did he just claim that every tablet in the world, his own included, is "a rip-off product", to quote the quote?
Has Apple so completely won the mind-share fight that every tablet product, no matter how technically distinctive, is an iPad clone?
The RDF is strong with this one.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
A no-name company with a skeevy CEO, a custom OS instead of Android or something more well-supported? Maybe at $100, or possibly even $200. But once you get into the $300 range, you've moved beyond the impulse buy and well into the realm where I want a name-brand reputable company backing it--and an OS that I know is and will be supported.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
For what it's worth, it's now easier in China to buy real Louis Vuitton bags than fakes. Several years ago, the fake markets were wide open and real LV stores were nonexistent. However, since the Great Cleanup of 2008 (Olympic year), the fake markets have been largely shut down. Real LV stores have opened legitimate operations. There's one within two miles of my house, and believe me, it's real. After being in factory business for a while, you can tell a real from a fake by the quality of materials, the stitching, etc. Sort of like how geeks can tell a phishing email right away by how it sounds, simply by virtue of receiving so many phishing emails, as opposed to the Great Unwashed Morons of Middle America who actually think there is a Nigerian prince on the other end of the connection. What morons! Can you believe the Constitution permits these people to vote! "Yeah, I sent my life savings to a person who contacted me by email, but I still maintain my political enfranchisement"...puh-LEEZ! We need an intelligence test before allowing voting...but I digress.
The fact is that legitimate LV shops have opened up, and the fake shops have been shut down the the power of the government. That's the nice thing about living in China, you really do have a one-to-one relationship with the government you live under, rather than the "laissez-faire" non-relationship that Americans have with their federal government. I imagine that it must be the same in other civilized countries like Europe, even though I've never been there.
Funny thing is, the elimination of the fakes is driving innovation in the local market. Now that everyone can't get an LV bag for $50, local brands are appearing to fill the gap between "crap no-name bag" and "luxury genuine foreign brand". Mr. Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan is operating on a three-year-old dead meme. I'm not saying that LV fakes aren't available, I'm saying that they're not readily available in fake markets like they were a few years ago. This opens everything for the local innovators (those expressly given permits by the government to innovate, of course). Chinese brands are not well-known because local merchants always default to making fakes - a dumb idea intended to maximize corporate profits on the backs of the workers. With the wise move by the government (which, in China, is staffed by scientists, engineers, and other no-bullshit-style atheists) to permanently close the fake markets, the intended consequences are to make independent innovation a reality. With any luck, we can only hope that American corporate CEOs will find themselves regulated in the same way. Imagine how better America would be if the government were run by scientists and engineers, and nutso religion-mongers were not allowed to hold office, much less vote?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So what you're saying is that it's time to break Apple up as it now has a monopoly on a product type. I mean, if Android has no chance at penetration, clearly we must make sure the market performs properly, and forcing Apple to spin off a chunk of its tablet division is the only solution.
Unless, of course, you're just another fucking useless fanboy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...I feel bad these suckers who are lining up to buy "a cheap carbon copy".
The only people buying non-iPad tablets are those who can't afford the iPad.
I was just in my boss' office about an hour an ago and he had an iPad box on his desk that we bought for research for a new project. He took the box off his desk and called it a "piece of crap" or something, and went on to wonder why anyone would buy an iPad when you can buy a Galaxy and have things like USB connectivity and the freedom to use it how you want to. This is from a guy in his 50s who runs a company creating online training courses. There are plenty of people who see the iPad for what it actually is who don't buy into Apple's marketing BS. Meanwhile, the lady who works here who actually does own an iPad primarily uses it to play Angry Birds, so there's your shrewd Apple consumer.
all you can do is attempt to sell a much lower end product without the compelling advantages that draw people to buy iPads.
What exactly are those compelling advantages? I don't own an iPad and I don't see anything compelling about it, so maybe you can fill me in.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
In other news, I'm going to sell my entire stock of pink unicorns for fifty cents each.
And I have as many pink unicorns as FusionGarage has $200 tablets that don't 100% suck.
While your specs are not met, $100 Android tablets are certainly available now. I can walk 5 blocks down to the CVS Pharmacy and by a $100 Android tablet today.
I swore to never buy an Apple product, lo and behold I ended up with an iPad 2. Ultimately, the aspect ratio of the Android horde was the deal breaker, the only one to successfully tempt me has been the Tab 10. The iPad 2 is smooth, sleek, works great, and most importantly works in portrait and landscape mode (I find myself using it in portrait more than landscape, since most web pages are vertical.) But the iPad 2 is not "magically better" than the other tablets. Having fiddled around with the Tab 10, I can say it's just as solid of an experience as an iPad 2. The problem is mentality. People have this strange idea in their head that Apple products are "the best" simply because of a logo. And honestly, the iPad 2 is top notch, and will stay top notch, until other designers are willing to go balls-to-the-wall and compete on equal grounds. That means getting over the "Apple is better by default" mentality. And this CEO literally just said "The iPad 2 is better than our product!" Which is even stupider than Motorola overpricing the Xoom.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Why would the rip off Louis Vuitton bag be any worse that the real thing? There are good knock offs and bad ones. Some of those rip off items come off the same assembly line as the real ones.
"have things like USB connectivity"
The first thing I do with any tablet is plug as many usb cords as I can into it and never move it from that spot since it'd take too much work to plug all those wires back in and it's a pain to move with that jungle of cords attached.
I know! That's exactly the same as occasionally plugging in a flash drive!
I'm so glad I never have to do that with my iPap!