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Handhelds

JooJoo Tablet Dies, Fusion Garage Continues On 91

Posted by timothy from the expiration-date dept.
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."
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JooJoo Tablet Dies, Fusion Garage Continues On More

JooJoo Tablet Dies, Fusion Garage Continues On

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  • Chandrashekar Rathakrishnan (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Thursday November 11, 2010 @04:20PM (#34200264) Homepage

    I could drive to the Apple Store during the time it takes to say that guy's name.

  • Where's the post mortem on this. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by falldeaf ( 968657 ) <falldeaf.gmail@com> on Thursday November 11, 2010 @04:27PM (#34200362) Homepage
    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.
  • "although sales figures have never been released it is believed there were only 90 pre-orders."

    Ouch!

    the KIN marketing team laughs at JOO(joo)

    • Re:Kin-like (Score:5, Interesting)

      by donnyspi ( 701349 ) <junk5&donnyspi,com> on Thursday November 11, 2010 @04:36PM (#34200486) Homepage
      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.

      • I suspect that a lot of the pre-orders were companies that did mobile application developments.

    • I bought one of these for a bit of fun and hacking...last week. I'm not joking, the thing has arrived in my country and I expect it to be delivered in the morning. I'm kinda laughing now about this, after all hardware is hardware.

  • Success is going from one failure to another without any loss of enthusiasm. So by that definition, Chandrashekar is a successful entrepreneur. :-)

  • Big surprise. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SocialEngineer ( 673690 ) <invertedpanda@@@gmail...com> on Thursday November 11, 2010 @04:41PM (#34200546) Homepage

    The largest following that I perceived with the device was the connection to TechCrunch and the price point. Once the drama with Arrington ensued it certainly brought some amusing attention to the device, but the price jump killed something that really didn't seem to have a whole lot of "killer instinct" in the innovation/competition department.

  • For $200...

  • Someone should tell... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CannonballHead ( 842625 ) on Thursday November 11, 2010 @04:55PM (#34200708)
    them. [thejoojoo.com]

  • Lesson Learned (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vanstinator ( 1938408 )
    The problem I always saw with the JooJoo was how Fusion Garage rushed it to market whilst in the middle of a complex lawsuit and the looming launch of the iPad. All the pieces could not have fallen together worse, yet they still pushed the launch. After the launch it was hardly better, the interface was buggy, laggy, and slow. It was lacking features, and was paled in comparison to the iPad. I can't help wonder what would have happened if they had taken more care in the product itself than worrying abou

  • I was hoping 2011 would be the year Linux was on the pad.

    • I was hoping 2011 would be the year Linux was on the pad.

      It will be, it's called Android.

      (N.B. iPad is already running unix...)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mevets ( 322601 )

        (whoosh), and linux isn't unix.

        • (whoosh), and linux isn't unix.

          Yes I know you were joking, my point is that the joke is reality. iOS and Android are already bigger in the tablet space than windows is even though windows still owns the desktop.

          I didn't linux say was unix, just pointing out that there are already advanced (and possibly superior) operating systems in that space. (Though Linux is a unix clone, always was, always will be. Just a different lineage.)

          • sigh (Score:2)

            by mevets ( 322601 )

            the joke was about feminine hygiene products. Not a great joke, and like the dissected frog, it will not recover.

          • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

            by RocketRabbit ( 830691 )

            What's this "and Android" crap? All we have seen so far is the unfinished but released Archos, and a few ultra-shitty tablets from China.

            There is no worthwhile Android tablet as of now. The iPad has the tablet market all to itself. It's been what, 6 months since the iPad came out, 10 since it was announced, and over 2 years since everybody saw it coming.

            By the time there's a halfway decent Android tablet, there will be a newer, better iPad out. You can bet the farm on that.

            • You know you really are full of shite. Stop talking about Java and Android as if you're some kind of expert; you're far away from such an esteemed title. Scathing insult sent from my Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab.
  • ...so can some one explain to me in simple terms why developing a tablet pc seems to take as much effort as the Manhattan project? Are we really talking about cutting-edge, rocket science or what?

    • If you look at the openmoko (I own two) the answer is yes. You need it to suspend to save power and wake up fast enough to be of use. While in suspend it needs to service things like the network interfaces without needing a full restart when it wakes up. It needs to cope with lots of permutations which developers won't take it through. For example if plug the moko into my car power charger and go for a long drive it will come on and off charge every time I switch off the engine, some times when it is in su

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by peragrin ( 659227 )

      yep it requires businessmen to think outside the box and think differently.

      That's why it took MSFT two months to figure out how to use a menu with xbox's Kinect.

      It is why MSFT even though they have produced a tablet OS since at least 2002, only ever produced ONE application that took complete advantage of said features.

      It is also why Apple is so secretive about their stuff. Do you know how many ipad failures where tested over the last 8 years?

    • Re:I'm a simple guy... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday November 11, 2010 @06:40PM (#34201782) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        [....] It's still not easy to do a good touch interface, but nobody is trying to make legacy UI apps work.

        And that was the beginning of the end for Windows.

        The vendor lock-in based on backwards compatibility began to end when PC hardware evolved beyond the need for keyboards and mice, and the users were finally compelled to abandon their favorite Windows 9x-based apps once and for all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altus ( 1034 )

        I agree with you completely on everthing you say, but it does make me wonder why there isnt a decent Android tablet yet. Certainly Android has a decent UI for tablets (maybe not perfect but close enough) and a host of applications.

        I have to figure that getting the hardware working just right, with serious battery life, light weight good power management without being too expensive is actually more of a challenge than you would think. From what I understand Apple was developing the iPad before they even st

  • 101 (Score:2)

    by Myopic ( 18616 )

    I guess now everyone will just have to buy an Archos 101 instead.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rchh ( 658159 )
      I have Archos Internet Tablet 5. They sold quite a few here in the States. Unfortunately, the device is buggy as hell. When they came out with the tablet, Archos promised Android 2+ update but so far it is still stuck with Android 1.6 (Donut). The "official" market for the tablet is a tiny subset of the market by Google. There are random reboots and hangups. For some reason the wireless is really crappy. To its credit,Archos has released a number of firmware updates. But even after all this updates, the ran

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Myopic ( 18616 )

        Really? I have an Archos 5, which is the reason I'm aware of the Archos 101. I just bought it a few weeks ago. Although imperfect, I haven't had problems with serious "bugs". My biggest problem is that Google Listen stops playing when the screen goes dark, which means I have to keep my screen on all the time. But, it is annoying that Archos doesn't offer up-to-date software -- very annoying.

        I bought mine to replace a dead iPod. I wasn't interested in another Apple product and the Archos 5 seemed like the be

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by neminem ( 561346 )
        You were able to hack the real google marketplace into running on the Archos 5 for ages... but it's actually been officially supported for a few months, now.

        I have one, too. It is, indeed, kind of buggy, and the UI's a bit weird. I've never seen it randomly reboot, but I *have* seen it go into sleep mode and refuse to come back out until it was hard-shutdown. But you can't complain about the lack of the marketplace anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by abigor ( 540274 )

      Archos always seem to have nice hardware but botched software. I guess we'll see.

    • Re:101 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RocketRabbit ( 830691 ) on Thursday November 11, 2010 @09:17PM (#34202930)

      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?

      • Let's try spelling that out in full:

        "The ARCHOS 101 internet tablet is a tablet who is choice you will be proud of."

        Nope, still doesn't make any sense.

  • I'm getting so sick and tired of these Web 2.0 names that try to copy Google. JooJoo, BeBo, Gadu gadu, ooVoo, etc.
    Why not stick with decent names like iPad, LifeBook, Slate, and Galaxy?

  • I'll bet 10 quatloos that less than 1% of /. readers ever even heard of this company or product.
  • Serves them right.
  • is it any surprise that it failed?
  • ... it's a bit of a joojooflop situation.

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