You Can Touch, But It'll Cost You

Michael Arrington's CrunchPad has become the Fusion Garage JooJoo, and it will launch on Friday. To listen to Arrington's talk of legal action last week, it seemed unlikely this tablet device would ever see the light of day. Yet here it is, real enough to sell, at least unless Arringon's lawyers get an injunction.Yet the JooJoo that Fusion Garage is selling misses the goal of the original CrunchPad in at least one important way: It costs $500 rather than the original goal of $200. What do you get for that $500 price? A tablet with a 12.1-inch capacitive color touch screen, running a proprietary version of Linux that boots in less than 10 seconds. Sorry, I'm not impressed.

I'll do just one comparision to show the completely whacked price-performance point of the JooJoo. I'm writing this on a Dell Studio 15 notebook, which has the same 1366x768 resolution as the JooJoo but a bit larger at 15.6 inches. The prices on this model start at $600, just $100 more than the JooJoo. For that you also get a full-sized keyboard, dual-core 2.1GHz processor, 3GB RAM, 500GB drive, built-in webcam, and Windows 7. That means you can run just about any application you want and hook up to other computers and devices like printers. With the JooJoo, all you can do is browse.

Then there is the name. JooJoo? That sounds just like JuJu, which is nearly always prefixed with the word "bad". Perhaps they were trying to evoke a pleasant idea of magical mystery, but in my mind magic is to juju as dream is to nightmare. I have a feeling that if Michael Arrington has his way, Fusion Garage's nightmare with the JooJoo has just begun.