The JooJoo is here... seriously | Hacker News Reader

The JooJoo is here... seriously

engadget.com

20 pointsicey30 comments

It looks much nicer than I was expecting. I'm glad to see that Apple's success is causing other companies to take design seriously.

As serious as "what would Apple do?" can be considered? ;-)

(device, not packaging)

I bet they sell dozens of them.

A bit more, but not much [1].

[1]: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/joojoo-preorders/

> I bet they sell dozens of them.

Indeed - this might go down as new textbook case of getting killed because you didn't get to market six months earlier.

Apple announced on January 27th, the rumor mill started picking up serious steam two to three weeks before there. If they'd met their original target of getting it out for '09 holiday season, who knows how many they sell and then get their foot in the door? Makes you think, especially given their internal conflicts. Could they have split the difference instead of going to war, and somehow gotten it out in November? They get it out in November for the holiday season, they do orders of magnitude more sales, and who knows how things turn out.

I don't mean it as a criticism, but the hardware design has all that we have come to associate with a typical apple product. The polished aluminium body, the black margins, etc etc including the packaging. Hope the software is not so blatantly inspired too from mac/iPhone OS

No, the software is blatantly inspired by Palm WebOS. :-)

They added a video with a little 4 minute mini-review. It looks decent but not really polished. The accelerometer doesn't show the screen turn for example it just goes black and then comes back on reoriented. It also seemed like it was a little unresponsive in that he often had to swipe several times to get the menu up.

I don't know. It doesn't look bad but having seen it in action I'm more determined to wait and see what companies like Asus and HP will be coming out with.

Those problems are software based, which can be fixed with an update.

> "which can be fixed with an update."

Yes, but what are the odds of that happening?

I don't mean whether or not it will get an update - I'm sure it will - but whether or not they will ever go back and re-do significant amounts of engineering for usability.

I'm not even sure it'll get an update.

They'd only sold 75 as of the end of February and only 12 of those in the month of February itself (it went on sale at the beginning of January and the iPad was announced at the end of January). I find it hard to believe sales recovered all that much in March.

So if I'm Fusion Garage's backers I'm looking for a jump in sales after it ships (because people will at least know it's not vaporware at that point). If that doesn't happen I think they bail at which point that joojoo is as good as it's going to get.

How do you know that?

I'm a big Apple fan and I must say that this looks very cool as well. Great job. Love the backstory too with the CrunchPad :-)

Building this on a proprietary platform, instead of a customized version of Android, is what is going to kill JooJoo, not the iPad.

Trying to support a proprietary OS and convince developers to build for an unproven platform (is this even possible with JooJoo?) put the nails in their coffin before they even started.

Hopefully they have the budget to live out that mistake and relaunch because their hardware looks slick, and they have some interesting UI / OS ideas that I think could catch on.

It's simply a web browser device, not a platform waiting for developers.

I don't know why anybody would part with $500 for a JooJoo in that case.

Of course! iPad has shut the door on the remotest chance that JooJoo wouldn't bomb hard.

This is a huge mistaken on their part. At least if they made it more "hackable" then they'd have a shot. We all saw how the original iPhone worked out without apps. It was nice, but with apps it became so much more.

The joojoo isn't competing with the ipad. It's competing with android tablets. And android Is a pretty robust platform.

http://www.engadget.com/photos/joojoo-unboxing/#2855943

This thing reeks of unprofessionality:

"...anywhere, anytime. Now, the internet is yours to enjoy on the go..."

Notice the extraneous comma after "Now"? A professional would have caught that before they printed their materials.

"joojoo. Our name means magic. Experience it."

Sounds like a 12-year-old saw an Apple ad and and wrote this second-rate copy.

http://www.engadget.com/photos/joojoo-unboxing/#2855958: Notice the unsightly arc that makes room for the audio jacks? Apple doesn't put ugly lines like that into their physical products (old brushed-metal Quicktime player aside). Betcha that the joojoo bozos thought they were being clever when they came up with this horror.

I should also say that Arrington probably wouldn't have done any better (he's a bozo too - just an "idea guy" with no ability to actually contribute anything substantial).

I must have pretty low standards -- I think it looks very professionally done. Way beyond my expectations based on all the negative press these guys have gotten.

Your low standards don't matter. The question is: how does this product compare against Apple's iPad?

It doesn't compare very well at all. If they botched the details that I've pointed out, what does that say about the rest of the product?

If they botched the details that I've pointed out, what does that say about the rest of the product?

Nothing at all, actually. Maybe it's just me who doesn't think that the marketing copy for something actually says anything about the value of that thing, though, no matter how many extra commas it might have.

You are under the assumption that it matters.

There are going to be hundreds if not thousands of tablet brands out there that are going to be doing just fine and deliver great products. JooJoo might or might not be one of them but they are at least of to a good start.

Yeah, doesn't look that bad to me either (but I'm getting an iPad, absolutely no question for me since I'm already heavily invested in Apple tech).

What I find a lot more scary is this: http://www.engadget.com/photos/joojoo-unboxing/#2855956

Vents? Seriously? Does it have a fan? Is it going to be noisy? Just imagine all the crap that can fall in there, all the stuff that can get caught on it.

The JooJoo is Atom-based; it's basically a netbook. It's probably a lot higher-power than an ARM tablet.

I don't know about that... The current generation of ARM processors are pretty fast. And you can't beat their performance per watt, so an ARM tablet will get much better battery performance. So long as an ARM tablet can display video well (which will require a dedicated chip for either) does it matter how much faster the processor is? Especially when battery life is taken into consideration?

I suspect wmf meant "uses more power", not "is more computationally powerful".

Ummm... laptops have had vents on them for quite awhile now and we've all survived alright. If this is your subtle way of saying this isn't an iPad, we knew that already :)

If there are vents you need to keep unobstructed, this has implications for using it in bed, say. I once fried a laptop's graphics card by leaving it on a bed. Modern components should have heat-triggered shutdown mechanisms, but your average consumer is completely ignorant of such things and will think it's broken when it suddenly blacks out.

Commas can be used to indicate a pause in speech. Read it that way and the sentence doesn't necessarily sound incorrect (the obvious purpose being to put emphasis on the word "Now")

I don't see anything wrong with the so-called "12-year-old" line.

The arc doesn't look particularly unsightly to me. It's clearly a personal preference and I can see why you wouldn't like it but your mistake is in assuming everything you dislike is automatically in poor taste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com