JooJoo’s Big Update
The JooJoo is long gone, but along with the delayed review, the final update was featured; Fusion Garage also announced new tablets, though to date no more has been heard from the Singapore based firm.
Whilst all of these Android and Windows tablets have been popping up on the back of the iPad like a moistened Mogwai, there’s still the JooJoo 12″ web-tablet that launched seemingly moments before Apple’s device hit the stores, and has been seen fleetingly in the media ever since.
I’d been using one for some time, before it was officially launched in the UK – and it was never to appear here properly due to concerns about the stability and “readiness” of the firmware.
As I updated GeeXtreme with news of the new Archos tablets, iOS 4 heading towards the iPad and a new wave of Shanzhai products preparing to hit our shores, Fusion Garage’s system seemed almost unfairly overlooked by mainstream blogs and sites…
While the original JooJoo got a firmware update – detailed below – the big news from Fusion Garage is now that the second-generation JooJoo is planned; and it’s based on Android.
The big headline for existing JooJoo owners was a new firmware, taking the device from 0.1.15 to 0.2.27 – and adding USB media support and touchscreen calibration to the setup. Most JooJoo owners will have updated, but for those who haven’t, I took a couple of pictures of the process when the unit updates the touchscreen driver.
Overall the JooJoo’s new firmware is more responsive and addresses a few issues that users had found; however, it remains true that the system is using a particularly clumsy way of presenting an “efficient” UI, is not a particularly efficient computer overall and has a poor battery life.
As long as Fusion Garage insist on trying to push it with their OS and as a “stand alone” product, rather than as a hardware platform for touch computing, it will continue to be compared with similarly inflexible hardware like Android and iOS tablets – and with the many manhours of development time sunk into those platforms, it will continue to come off badly in such comparisons.
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