Digital Home Thoughts: Engadget Hands-on with the JooJoo

"There are just so many things we wish Fusion Garage did differently with the JooJoo. Even putting aside the fact that Apple's $499 iPad brings more to the table than just web browsing, the JooJoo is less portable, has a worse (if larger) screen, is unintuitive to use, and ships with half-baked software. We commend the start-up on its nice piece of hardware design, but until the software is given some much-needed love and the price is seriously reevaluated we simply cannot recommend this tablet. To add insult to injury, Apple's entry level iPad provides a much more seamless and feature-packed experience, and there are plenty of $199-ish ARM-based tablets just around the corner. We told you it was terrible timing. The one shining light we can see is that Fusion Garage has actually managed to finish and build this thing, which is a lot more than can be said for the dozens of ARM / Tegra / Fairy dust-powered, Android / Linux / CE-based tablet prototypes we've seen in the wild."

I guess I'd been so caught up in the JooJoo hoopla that I'd just assumed it has more features than it really does. For example, I assumed it would be able to play locally stored video. Apparently, this is only a web browser. Compared to the iPad, the ability to play Flash is the one positive; but the fact that it doesn't do it very well just kind of defeats the point. So even if Flash is an absolute essential, I'd recommend holding out for one of the other tablet offerings that should be coming out soon.