If you’re in Europe, I’ve got good news for you. The JooJoo tablet [News, specifications] is now available to pre order. No, don’t laugh because there’s an interesting twist here. The price.
Ignore the reviews for a minute and think about a 12 inch multitouch capacitive screen with BT, Wifi, SSD, Nvidia ion and the Atom1.6 CPU. Then add (I assume its possible) Ubuntu, Moblin, X86 Android or some other flavor of Linux and you’ve got yourself quite a nice experimental pad for just 359 Euros. If you like the though of developing or working with a home tablet, that’s not a bad price. With the right software it could make for a really nice home theater component. Even XP should run on it if you can squeeze it into the 4GB Flash. It’s no iPad and you’ll have to contend with short battery life but it could be more fun than an Archos 9 which costs more, for less.
If you’re in Germany, there’s even more ‘pad’ news for you today because the WePad just went up for pre-order on Amazon.de [WePad info, specs] 449 Euros buys you the non 3G, 16Gb version and 569 adds another 16GB and the 3G module.
There’s no direct word on shipping dates for either of the two devices but we had previously heard that the WePad won’t be shipping until June/July. The JooJoo is in production although this push for European orders could be to fund the next production run a somewhat risky thought.
Is there something better round the corner? We think there might be. Despite good efforts by both companies concerned here we think that the current Intel Atom platform hasn’t got either the right hardware or software build yet. That might change with Moorestown and MeeGo but for the time being, we’re more interested in the ARM/Android platforms based on their ground-up personal, touch and power-efficient architecture.
It’s finally happened. The JooJoo gets an Engadget review and there’s really not much to say; because the JooJoo doesn’t do much. It’s a big browsing pad with very few alternative usage models or software. 1.2KG is, as expected, way too heavy for a single hand usage (pretty dumb when you consider that you’re going to need one hand to use the one screen keyboard) and again, as expected, has a complete roadblock/showstopper of a battery life. 2.5hrs
Trust me, when, after 15 minutes use, you start to see 1hr-something on the battery meter, it’s a horrible feeling.
Using a (old) netbook platform was never the best design decision because it’s just not small/powerful/light/efficient enough. The Intel Menlow platform would have been better.
Engadget wraps up with this:
There are just so many things we wish Fusion Garage did differently with the JooJoo. Even putting aside the fact that Apple’s $499 iPad brings more to the table than just web browsing, the JooJoo is less portable, has a worse (if larger) screen, is unintuitive to use, and ships with half-baked software. We commend the start-up on its nice piece of hardware design, but until the software is given some much-needed love and the price is seriously reevaluated we simply cannot recommend this tablet.
I’ll wrap up with this:
If you want to mess around with a tablet for web browsing, look at the Archos 7 Home Tablet that is due to launch very soon. It’s cheap (under $200) , runs a version of Android and does a lot more than the JooJoo. It won’t be as ‘big’ and fast as a JooJoo but it will allow you to check out some casual (and mobile) tablet action without having to commit to a $500, 1.2KG table-top device. Other alternatives can be found here:
If you’re in Germany, there’s even more ‘pad’ news for you today because the WePad just went up for pre-order on Amazon.de [WePad info, specs] 449 Euros buys you the non 3G, 16Gb version and 569 adds another 16GB and the 3G module.
