The ill-fated JooJoo tablet that debuted the same weekend as the Apple iPad had fallen off the radar for the last few months. But now the Singapore-based Garage Fusion Garage says it will be back next year with a new family of tablets based partly on the Android operating system.
“We want to say we are alive and looking at launching a new product in the first half of next year,” Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, CEO of Fusion Garage told Wired.com. “We will build a new operating system based in part on Android and launch a family of tablets next year.”
The new tablet will support the Android app store, Android Market.
It’s an ambitious dream for a company that struggled to launch its first tablet, a 12.1-inch touchscreen device, and received a scathing review.
JooJoo started its life as CrunchPad, an ambitious project dreamed up by Web 2.0 chronicler Michael Arrington. Arrington posted a note on his TechCrunch blog outlining the idea for a $200 Linux-based tablet and partnered with Fusion Garage to launch the product.
A fallout between the two led to a lawsuit and Fusion Garage renamed the CrunchPad JooJoo. In March, it launched the JooJoo for $500. But since then buzz about the JooJoo hasn’t been encouraging. The device drew criticism for the bugs in its software and user interface. Documents filed for the JooJoo TechCrunch lawsuit showed just 90 people had pre-ordered the product.
Sales have been better than that, claims Rathakrishnan.
“If those were really the kind of numbers we saw, we wouldn’t be still here today talking about new products,” he says. Fusion Garage has raised an additional $10 million in funding, he claims.
Meanwhile, Fusion Garage has decided to drop the the JooJoo product line. The new tablets are likely to have a different brand.
Though the tablets will be based on Android, it won’t be entirely the Android OS and a skin on top of it, says Rathakrishnan. Fusion Garage plans to take “elements of Android” such as the base kernel and then build on it.
“Think of it as Mac using Unix BSD,” says Rathakrishnan. Fusion Garage now has about 40 employees.
Rathakrishnan says he has learnt from his mistakes.
“With JooJoo we launched prematurely,” he says. “We wanted to be there ahead of everyone else, and we were there before Apple but the product was entirely ready. When you push the envelope, you have more problems than you anticipate.”
Since JooJoo’s launch, Rathakrishnan says his team has worked to make the performance stable and iron out bugs. There’s still work to be done, he says. For instance, though the JooJoo supports Flash it is not GPU-accelerated so it is still slow.
As for upcoming Fusion Garage tablets, they will be ready to take on the big boys of consumer technology–Dell, Samsung, Research In Motion and Asus all of whom have promised or introduced new tablets– claims Rathakrishnan.
“We will differentiate ourselves by innovation,” he says. “What we will produce will redefine the category.”
The JooJoo may have been a bust but Fusion Garage isn’t willing yet to give up on its dreams.
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Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
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