A few days ago in a land a few time zones away, one tablet became another and, just for a moment, stopped everyone speculating about Apple’s entry into the decidedly fledgling market segment. According to Pocket-lint Dell is similarly jumping aboard, said to be set to unveil a five-inch tablet running Android, specs that would put it right up in the Archos Internet Tablet’s grill and, thankfully, should mean a much lower price-point than the Joojoo. Word is we’ll all be getting a glimpse of the thing at CES next month, and knowing Dell it’ll probably be a very fleeting one. We’re guessing this is the Streak, but would love to be surprised by something entirely new.

Tablet Wars: Episode V – Dell Strikes Back at CES? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Australia can’t covet it all to themselves forever, right? Acer’s Aspire Timeline 1820PT convertible has finally popped up on an UK retailer site with a £529.99 (about $858 US) price tag and a “due for release date” of January 25th, 2010. What’s that? You want news about a stateside release? Keep sticking with the teaser, it’s the best you’re gonna get for now.

[Thanks, Andy]

Acer Aspire Timeline 1820PT now made to order in UK, estimated for January 25 launch originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From the webcast yesterday, the JooJoo (previously named Crunchpad) seemed flimsy and barely working. But now that we spent a good deal of hands on time with it, we can say that Fusion Garage executed an internet tablet quite well.

Specs

Here are some new facts I gathered from the meeting. First, the device runs a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB RAM. The guys at JooJoo said they weren’t ready to reveal specs yet, but I saw the bootup sequence—a standard BIOS setup that displayed what it was booting to—and saw the specs. Chandra, CEO of Fusion Garage, says that the demo hardware was basically the final hardware, so it’s easy to put two and two together.

As for the graphics card + CPU combination, it’s probably an Nvidia Ion chipset. They claim that it handles 1080p YouTube video fine—we only got to see a few seconds of 720p and 1080p HD YouTube video because the internet connection was acting up—so it’s probably an Ion. But the HD video we tested looked just fine on its 12-inch, 1366×768 resolution screen. Again, the Ion chipset is just an educated guess, but there are few other hardware options that can handle 1080p video smoothly, and an Atom CPU by itself (which we did see) can’t do it on its own.

There is a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a built-in webcam at 1.3 megapixels, a charging port and a USB slot. The external card slot present in the prototype isn’t going to make it to the final version, but they are thinking of making it available to put a 3G card in there in the future. No TV out/HDMI out yet, but they are thinking about that. There are built-in speakers for playing back audio without headphones, and they’re decent enough that you can actually listen to them, but you’ll want to plug them in to speakers for any kind of extended video consumption.

Performance

The tablet actually handled pretty well, with browsing web pages, transitioning between tabs (windows) and opening up new web pages working fine. There’s an accelerometer in there to detect between vertical and horizontal orientations.

The body is solid, sturdy and graced with a bright 12-inch screen. The back is curved and made of a plastic that feels nice in your hand, and the whole thing doesn’t seem too heavy to prop up on a bed or a toilet.

In short, it’s an actual web browsing tablet that you’d be perfectly fine using.

The software

The entire system is basically a gateway to your browser, which is based off WebKit, the same code that powers Safari and Google’s Chrome. It’s fast, and handles gestures (pinching to go back a level, swiping to move up and down) just fine. There are other gestures that will be included in the final build, like two finger swiping for going back and forth in history and a bookmark swipe, but we didn’t get to see that. But, you can’t zoom into text. That’s partially because the pinching is already used for going in and out of your windows into the home screen, but also partially because the screen is 12 inches. You don’t need to really zoom into text on a laptop-sized screen of 12 inches. And they also said they may make LARGER sized tablets as well, with 12 being their smallest size.

JooJoo’s keyboard looks like this, and takes up only a portion of the screen. It’s usable, but you don’t want to use it to bang out a blog post; this is mainly for consuming media.

Fusion Garage’s concept for the product is that the “internet is the application”, which means you can’t save photos or files locally and you can’t access any of the 4GB of storage to do any user level stuff. The most you can dictate is how much each internet application (e.g. Gmail or Google Wave) can have for a local cache.

It does support Flash as usual, except when you play HD Flash it’ll force you into fullscreen mode to render better/faster. And if you want to read PDFs, it’ll force you into Google’s web-based PDF doc reader. So it handles PDFs, but not “natively”.

Your home screen is composed almost entirely of icons—shortcuts—to web applications. The screen is customizable with your own applications, eventually, and has a weird feature where it displays a different color background whenever you go back to it. Fusion Garage is thinking of taking this out, or swapping it with some other feature.

As for multitasking, Fusion Garage says that they will have specific APIs available to webapps to incorporate in order to pass notifications up to the user. For example, if Twitter refreshes in another window and you’re watching a YouTube video, a popup will show and tell you you have something else going on. The APIs will be available at launch, but it’s up to websites to support them.

How good is it?

Despite its weird birth issues this past week with all the Arrington trouble, the JooJoo is surprisingly solid. You can tell Fusion Garage spent a good deal of time polishing the hardware, by the fact that they managed to include a 12-inch screen that’s decent enough to not have lousy viewing angles, plus support 1080p HD video playback.

The only trouble right now is software, which is only about 75% done. Fusion Garage plans to ship devices about 8-10 weeks after preorders, which start this friday. If FG can manage to finish the software and get it to a point where it’s transparent to the user who just wants to get online, $500 isn’t too outrageous a price to pay. Decent netbooks are around that price, and it’s about the price you’d expect Apple to charge for their tablet, if not even more. We’d of course be very happy if it were down at $300 or $400, but it’s basically a new device in a new market, and you’ll have to hand over a little extra for being an early adopter.

So right now we’re at a wait and see status. The JooJoo seems good, from our time with it, but it really needs to be taken home and thoroughly tested with different webapps, watching a lot of HD video and streaming music. At the very least, we’ll see how much of that 5-hour battery life stands up to constant use. You can pre-order it yourself this Friday, but, since there’s some legal troubles on the horizon, you probably want to wait until the whole thing clears up first before putting any money down. [JooJoo]

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.

CrunchPad, the touchscreen tablet that was declared dead a week ago by its impresario inventor Michael Arrington, is back. A Singapore-based company, Fusion Garage, announced plans to introduce the device under a new name: JooJoo.

JooJoo will have a 12.1-inch capacitive touchscreen, 4 GB solid state drive, an accelerometer that will allow it to switch between landscape and portrait modes, Wi-Fi connectivity and a battery life of up to five hours. It will run a custom-designed operating system that will allow the machine to boot in nine seconds and access the internet near-instantaneously.

But instead of the initial price point of $200, JooJoo will now cost $500.

“It’s a product whose death has been greatly exaggerated,” says Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, CEO and founder of Fusion Garage, which until last week was working with Arrington to design the device. Rathakrishnan showed the device, seen above, in a web conference Monday, and will be following that up with hands-up demos to the press later in the day. (The green hue of the screen is caused by the video camera used, Rathakrishnan claimed.)

Fusion Garage will start taking pre-orders for the device December 11th, and will deliver it in 8-10 weeks, says Rathakrishnan.

The launch of JooJoo is yet another twist in the strange tale of a tablet device that first surfaced last year. Arrington floated the idea of a tablet in June 2008 when he talked of a touchscreen device that would run Firefox and Skype on top of a Linux kernel. The tablet would have low-end hardware — a power button, a headphone jack, speakers, a microphone and a built-in camera for video. It would come with Wi-Fi, 512 MB of memory, a 4-GB solid-state hard drive and no keyboard. All this for $200.

The idea seemed promising, especially because other major PC makers including Apple and Dell are reportedly working on tablets due for launch next year. The notion of a tablet capable of showing large, interactive text and graphics has excited magazine publishers, including Wired’s corporate parent Condé Nast, which is among several companies planning tablet-based magazine apps. Time Inc. also recently showed a slick tablet concept video for Sports Illustrated.

But after repeated delays, Arrington declared the CrunchPad project dead last week. Arrington accused Fusion Garage of cutting him out of the deal. Based on pressure from shareholders, Fusion Garage had decided to move forward and sell the device directly without TechCrunch’s involvement, said Arrington, who has said he will pursue legal action against Fusion Garage.

Rathakrishnan says his company cut Arrington out because Fusion Garage “designed, funded and developed the product,” with Arrington failing to deliver on any of his promises.

“There are dreamers and there are doers,” he says. “Fusion Garage is the only actual doer in this story.”

Rathakrishnan says he reached out to Arrington in 2008 after he read the latter’s post about the need for an inexpensive web tablet. Arrington, in turn, offered to introduce Fusion Garage to hardware designers, and investors, he says. Ultimately, TechCrunch wanted to acquire Fusion Garage.

“But nothing tangible came out of it,” claims Rathakrishnan. “Michael was unable to deliver.”

“There’s talk and then there’s action,” he says. “We completed development of our OS, hired the expertise to make key hardware design decisions, develop the platform and a new finished prototype. And we secured our own funding.”

That’s why Fusion Garage owns the IP to the product and can introduce it without having Arrington or CrunchPad associated with it, says Rathakrishnan.

Meanwhile, Arringon has threatened to file a lawsuit against Fusion Garage. But so far, no case has been filed. Rathakrishan claims no contracts were ever signed between Fusion Garage and TechCrunch around the CrunchPad.

When Arrington first talked about the project, critics pointed out that its projects $200 pricetag and aggressive timeline were unrealistic, given the ambitious features Arrington had planned. Production costs and a challenging retail environment would eat into profit margins, they said.

And they were right, says Rathakrishnan.

“There are dreams and there are hallucinations,” he says. “Arrington’s dreams of $200-$300 are as real as his claims of IP ownership. Nothing worthwhile can be delivered at that price.”

So far Fusion Garage has raised $3 million in funding and is set to announce an additional round of investment shortly, says Rathakrishnan.

As for marketing muscle that TechCrunch or Arrington could have provided, Rathakrishnan says its something that Fusion Garage won’t really miss.

“Writing blog posts is not marketing,” he says. “If marketing was only about talk, we would have seen a successful tablet years ago. Microsoft has been talking about tablets for years. TechCrunch’s marketing capability is defined to a blog.”

Arrington did not reply to a request for comment.

See Also:

• CrunchPad Tablet Dies Stillborn
• Calling CrunchPad: Is Anybody Home?
• CrunchPad Nears Production, Looks Awesome
• Web 2.0 Mogul Michael Arrington Creates New Web Tablet
  

Photo: Screenshot of the JooJoo tablet