Hasta La Gadget!

The $200 touchscreen tablet known as the CrunchPad has morphed into a $500 device called JooJoo.

Designed and developed by a Singapore-based company, Fusion Garage, JooJoo is tablet-like device made for internet surfing and little else.

Wired.com got some hands-on time with the JooJoo. At 2.4 lbs, JooJoo is a lightweight, slim tablet with a vivid, crisp 12.1-inch touchscreen display.

Beautiful Hardware, Fast Boot-up

JooJoo has a capacitive touchscreen, which means it is about as responsive as an iPhone touchscreen and as much of a delight to use. There’s also an LCD screen that supports high-definition content. Overall, it measures about 13.3-inches deep, but has a slimmer profile than Apple’s Macbook Air.

JooJoo runs a custom operating system built by Fusion Garage and boots in just under nine seconds directly to a homepage screen. It’s fast and takes the user directly to services that they may use.

The homepage screen is divided vertically into three sections: Be connected, Be informed, and More apps.

Under the ‘Be connected’ tab, there are web services such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube among others.

The ‘Be Informed’ tab features sites such as The New York Times, Reuters, AOL and CNN.

More apps has icons that link, for instance, to Google docs, Yahoo and Hulu.

Now here’s the weird part, a default option on the device called ‘Paint me a new background’ changes the homepage screen color to a new one every time you come back to it. And screen colors include red, violet, green and yellow — all of which seem rather bright and a tad harsh.

The good news, says Fusion Garage, is that users can always uncheck the option and set it to plain white. Still, it’s rather puzzling to us why Fusion Garage would offer this feature.

JooJoo is also thin in the number of ports it offers. There’s just one USB port. It also has a standard headphone and microphone jack.