Is there anything cooler than ipad? Yes, Joo Joo

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After the iPad was announced for $499, (a few) people asked, "What about JooJoo?" the first $499 web tablet, formerly known as CrunchPad. Well, it's on. JooJoo's now in full production, and plans to open a web app store.

I talked to Fusion Garage CEO Chandra, who said they're not only getting another round of investing, they've struck a deal CSL Group, Malaysia's largest OEM—they make fabulous BlackBerry knockoffs called Blueberrys—to cover their full outgoing manufacturing cost in exchange for revenue sharing. In other words, CSL's covering the cost to make the tablet (which is being made by one of the "top three or four" Taiwanese OEMs, according to Chandra), and CSL gets a slice of cash from every JooJoo sold. The upshot is that they're expecting to hit their target of shipping JooJoos within 8-10 weeks of taking pre-orders—so like, end of this month—with enough produced to "meet demand," though Chandra wouldn't reveal specific numbers.

The other big news is that they're planning on opening a web app store. Chandra says that one of the iPad's advantages over JooJoo was the App Store, which made app discovery easy through categorization. The JooJoo take is that "the internet is the largest app store," and what they'll be doing is categorizing all kinds of web apps in an "app store" to make them easy to find. (Personal aside: The app store concept must diiiiiiieeeeee.)

To that end, the other thing the iPad has over JooJoo is that app developers can tap into the hardware natively, which is why Fusion Garage is introducing APIs to let web developers get at the JooJoo hardware, like to use the accelerometer for gaming. Chandra says that the APIs are "unique, but standards driven," and easy to extend current web apps with their relatively simple APIs. We'll see.

Asked what he thinks about the iPad more broadly, and Chandra said that he's amazed Apple's jumping "into a category that we've defined." He points out that JooJoo is African for "magical," which is exactly how Apple described iPad, and that the iPad even comes in at the exact same pricepoint of $499. (No, I'm not really sure how "African" is a language.) But, despite Apple being, uh, Apple, he thinks JooJoo has a few advantages: They're launching first; they've got a bigger screen (12.1 massive inches); and it's an "uncompromised" web experience, since they'll have Flash, and you'll be able to use sites like Facebook in their full glory, not miniaturized app form.


https://thejoojoo.com/

JooJoo Hands On Demo from Gizmodo on Vimeo.