Fusion Garage JooJoo

Design and Specs
Measuring 7.8 by 12.8 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and weighing in at a portly 2.4 pounds, the JooJoo really needs a lap or a desktop to rest on—this is not a handheld device. Its bright, good-looking 12.1-inch multi-touch capacitive wide screen features 1,366-by-768-pixel resolution, and like the iPad, it's a serious
fingerprint magnet. Unlike the iPad, it comes with a cleaning cloth to wipe the screen down. The JooJoo only comes in a single 4GB capacity, and currently, according to Fusion Garage, those four gigs are reserved for caching, not storage. It features a camera for video conferencing—something the iPad notably lacks, but in our tests, we couldn't get it to work. Inside, there's an accelerometer so the screen orientation shifts between portrait and landscape modes, and support for 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, but Bluetooth functionality is not yet enabled. (Like many of the JooJoo's cataloged specs, actual functionality will be added with a future firmware update.)

The right-hand panel has an input for the included power adapter (the rechargeable battery is not user removable), an earphone jack (like the iPad, earphones are not included), and a microphone input—both are 3.5mm. On the left side of the tablet, there's a USB port with, again, limited functionality—and a finicky Power button that, in my tests, didn't like to be touched. When the JooJoo is powered up, the button lights up white, and when the tablet is in sleep mode, it has an orange glow. The silvery plastic back panel features a built-in speaker and necessary vents—the JooJoo gets very hot. The device feels cheaply constructed, but at first glance, it looks alluring. There are various attractive wallpaper choices for the home screen, and they are actually quite inviting, standing in stark contrast to the user experience that lies ahead.

General Operation (or Mass Frustration)
Before I continue, I want to again mention that Fusion Garage has assured me that many of the issues I'm about to report will be addressed in a series of software updates and fixes over the next month or so. For instance, right now, the USB port can only be used for peripherals, like a mouse or a keyboard. Eventually, the company plans to add support for accessing data from USB drives, pairing with Bluetooth devices, and working offline. Promises are promises, and once we see these updates, we'll reevaluate the JooJoo, but for now, we're reviewing the product we have (the same product you can buy on Fusion Garage's Web site today).

At the heart of the JooJoo's many problems is its browser-based operating system, which was, according to the company, "created from Linux and Webkit." Simply put, the interface doesn't work very well. If you don't use your JooJoo for a bit, the screen goes to sleep—a typical power-saving technique employed by many touch-screen-based devices. The JooJoo, however, wakes up like it was out all night swigging from a bottle of tequila. One tap of the power button should wake the JooJoo from its slumber, but this rarely occurs. And the power button is not only unresponsive, but it's recessed, so it's hard to tell whether or not you've actually connected with it. I found myself pressing, or pressing and holding several times; this often resulted in the JooJoo crashing.

Even when the JooJoo is wide awake, it has trouble responding to touch and doing what you want it to. For instance, if you want to adjust the screen brightness, you need to tap Settings and a submenu appears—this is where you tap Brightness. In the several times I attempted this simple maneuver, the JooJoo successfully brought up the brightness controls half of the time. The tablet also defaults to Ambient mode, which is the first thing you must disable in order to make the screen brighter. You might want to save the brightness settings once you've finally successfully completed this task, but not so fast! That's impossible. Next time you power up the JooJoo, the brightness level returns to its very dim default ambient setting. Fusion Garage promises a future fix for this.

For a device that has a difficult time responding to touch, making the home screen and main controls accessible only with the downward swipe of two fingers may sound like the kiss of death. It is. (There's no hardware Home button, like you'll find on the iPad.) At this particular moment, my JooJoo is not responding to my touch, regardless of whether I tap on an icon or use the simple gestures I had to memorize for basic operation (there's an animated tutorial preloaded on the device). I have no recourse but to power down the device and hope it'll respond next time. This seems to work most of the time, but once JooJoo's display goes dark, all bets are off. By the way, to properly power down, you hold down the awkward Power button for five seconds until the screen turns itself off.

On-Screen Typing and Browsing
Believe it or not, when the JooJoo is behaving, set-up is a breeze. This is primarily because the device doesn't do much—currently, it just surfs the Web—so all you need to do is connect to your wireless network. I had no issues hooking up with various routers on the first try. And unlike with the screen brightness, JooJoo can remember your network information and connects automatically the next time you power up.

The virtual keyboard that appears is small, but works just fine—provided the JooJoo is in the mood to respond to your fingers. It's strange that Fusion Garage didn't make a larger keyboard considering the width of the screen—in landscape mode, the centered on-screen keyboard occupies about half the total display width. Response time is generally better on the keyboard than with icons on the desktop, but there's no predictive text feature. My clumsy fingers produced plenty of typos on the JooJoo's keyboard, whereas the iPad corrected me as I typed.

I often found that the pull-down JooJoo toolbar was in the way of buttons or links on various Web sites. This is solved by a simple downward swipe, but the browser lacks the grace of iPad's simple-but-useful Safari app. For instance, you may try to swipe to make the toolbar appear, but instead accidentally select a link on the Web site.

Web pages load about as fast as they do on an iPad, and yes, the JooJoo has Flash support so it can load sites like Hulu and stream video—something the iPad can't do. The iPad, however, has apps to help combat this shortcoming—a YouTube app optimized for its screen, for instance, which eliminates the need to visit YouTube's Flash-based Web site. The JooJoo simply loads Web sites—there are no apps, and sites are not optimized for the 12.1-inch screen, which causes problems when you're trying to select something from a tiny pull-down menu with your finger. Despite its large size, the JooJoo isn't finger friendly, it's begging for a stylus to maneuver around the Web. Unlike with the iPad, the JooJoo will work with Bluetooth mice (again, promised in a firmware update); that will help the Web browsing experience some. Also, though an admittedly clunky solution, you can connect a USB mouse.

Among the browsing shortcuts loaded on the Home page are CNN, Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, Hulu, IMDB, LastFM, Picasa, Twitter, YouTube, and several more, all of which work just as they should. But again, these are merely bookmarks that immediately open the browser to that particular site. A short menu to the left of the icons organizes the shortcuts into groups. Here, the icons are arranged by categories that sometimes make sense, like "Social," for Twitter and Facebook, and sometimes by categories that make, well, less sense, like "Entertain" or "Portal."

Support for Other Media (or the Lack Thereof)
Fusion Garage claims there will be support for loading music, video, and photo files on to the JooJoo via the USB port, but currently, you can only access media content via the Web—on a site like Pandora or Netflix. Also, despite the large, wide screen, viewing video is not necessarily a great experience. Even if you get a steady stream without Wi-Fi-related hiccups, viewing angles on the JooJoo are tight—if you don't look at the screen dead-on, the picture becomes dark. The screen's high resolution also means little when the only content you can consume is streaming video, most of which will not take full advantage of the HD display.

As I mentioned earlier, currently, there's no support for playing files off a USB drive, but Fusion Garage has plans to support the following file types: AVI, MPEG 4, FLV, MOV, OGG, OGM and OGV, WMV, DiVX, JPG, PNG, GIF, and TIF. It's not mentioned, but I assume MP3 will be supported, as well.

The built-in 1.3-megapixel camera is intended for video conferencing. Gmail's video chat gave me an error message— JooJoo's OS doesn't support it. Fusion Garage claims that the free TokBox service (Free) should work with the video camera, but I had no luck in various attempts, and logging into TokBox often did funny things like, say, load up a Google document. It's on the list of future fixes.

Speaking of Google docs, you can work in Google Documents or other Web-based programs, but it is not easy with the small keyboard, which seems to pop up at inopportune times, like when you press the Save button under the File menu. Still, being able to do something productive is a plus, even if it's not thanks to Google rather than the JooJoo itself. Currently, there's no support for downloading a document and saving it anywhere on the device—everything is saved in the cloud.

Fusion Garage rates the JooJoo's rechargeable battery's life at up to 5 hours using Wi-Fi, and less if you're streaming HD video. This estimate is roughly half the 9 hours and 25 minutes we got from the iPad, which was connected to a Wi-Fi network while playing music, videos, games, or using apps. During our rundown test, which involved Web browsing, Youtube and Hulu playback, and some idle time, the JooJoo was able to hold a charge for just 3 hours.

To JooJoo or Not? The Answer is Clear
Overall, the JooJoo just has way too many issues: Why would anyone pay $500 for a device that's essentially a Web browser trapped under a huge touch screen? Even if the JooJoo worked flawlessly, it's still about $300 too expensive. It stands no chance against the similarly priced iPad, which can do so much more and do it all so much better. If you're in the market for a tablet, but you're not into the iPad, hopefully, contenders on the horizon, like the HP Slate and the Microsoft Courier will give you some viable non-Apple options. The Fusion Garage JooJoo, however sadly, as it is today, isn't even equipped to compete. It's difficult for start-ups—even ones with good ideas—to compete with the big boys in the world of electronics, where everything from funding to manufacturing and customer service is an involved process. Fusion Garage is run by smart people, and the JooJoo is an impressive science project, but it's a lousy tablet. Somewhere, Michael Arrington is thanking his lucky stars that the former Crunchpad is not his baby anymore.

If the promised firmware updates magically improve the JooJoo, you'll be the first to know. For now, though, don't buy one.

Spec Data

Screen Resolution 1366 x 768 pixels

Screen Size 12.1 inches

Storage Capacity (as Tested) 4 GB

Dimensions 7.8 x 12.8 x 0.7 inches

Weight 2.4 lb

Networking Options 802.11b, 802.11g

Email Access In browser only

Web Browser Yes

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