JooJoo tablet gets a facelift before first shipments
It seems that Fusion Garage is taking the extra time before its first JooJoo tablets ship to make some upgrades to the operating system in both functionality and looks.
The JooJoo has had a long, torrid story leading up to its release. It started off life as the CrunchPad, a tablet device that TechCrunch wanted to release. When that deal fell through — for reasons that still aren’t clear — it got rebranded as the JooJoo. Despite legal threats, Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan promised it would go into production, but then it missed its original ship date.
Engadget is now reporting that Fusion Garage has taken this month-long delay in the ship date to make some major overhauls to the interface, tweak a ton of little things about its operation and even change the physical backing of the device from black to a champagne color.
Most notably, gone is the solid color main page with huge icons. Replacing it is customizable wallpaper images with rows of small icons over it. In the meat of the system, they’ve added full Flash support so you can play YouTube videos, or in a custom H.264 HD breakout player if you prefer. The keyboard now has two options where you can use either a full keyboard, or a smaller one for one-handed typing that can be moved to wherever you like on the screen. You can also now play local videos stored on USB thumb drives, opening up a lot more entertainment possibilities with the device.
Overall it sounds like a lot of positive changes, but with the lingering chance of legal actions over the history of the device, and the iPad about to storm on the scene, it could still be a hard road for the JooJoo going forward to find success.
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