George Hall Online

Exploring Social Media, Tech And Gadgets

iPad Versus JooJoo

It wasn't all that long ago (last year) that I was reading of the Crunchpad idea coming out of Techcrunch.  On Friendfeed, there was always a lot of fun discussions and playful banter between Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington and a lot of mention of the Crunchpad project in the prototyping stages.

Of course, since then, there's been a bit of acrimony between Arrington and Fusion Garage, who've taken the concept, removed the Techcrunch involvement and remarketed the Crunchpad as the JooJoo.

Arrington is now suing Fusion Garage.

I'm trying to imagine how the Crunchpad/JooJoo would be if the partnership had remained, what sort of impact Arrington would have had if he were still involved and whether he'd have asked for some features in the pad that would have competed better against the iPad.

As it is, as the JooJoo is currently promoted, I'm scratching my head on whether it really is a worthy competitor to the iPad.

It's a dog-eat-dog world in business, but what happened with the Crunchpad project wouldn't exactly make me feel happy buying from Fusion Garage.

Then there's the way the JooJoo is in tech terms.  Effectively it's wi-fi only at the moment.  There's some talk of Fusion Garage partnering with telecommunications companies to perhaps get something akin to 3G on it.  It has 4GB of space on it.  It's 16:9 aspect in a 12.5 inch diagonal size.  And really, all it does is access the web for pretty much all its apps.

While I like my web access, there's some times I like to turn wi-fi and 3G off and just run a few things offline.  So really, if the JooJoo is ALL internet, I'd be disappointed.  Eventually it's going to be possible for us to have full cloud access, but not at this fledgling stage of a lot of the key technologies.  There's still a point to having some things still available offline.

So in reality, the JooJoo is just an over-sized web browser.  Interestingly easy solution, I suppose, but a bit lazy in development terms.  Google and Chrome OS would probably still do it a lot better.

I've yet to read what else the min-Linux system the JooJoo runs off actually does apart from that.

So my iPad still has more real app capability than a JooJoo.  It's also got a few decent programs that will keep me occupied if my wi-fi suddenly goes off.

The size and aspect ratio...I'm a firm believer in the idea that a good tablet is at its best at 4:3.  I find my iPad comfortable at that aspect ratio.  The more I keep looking at any tablet which is 16:9, I try to imagine cradling such an aspect ratio in my arms.  I think Apple hit the sweet spot with the 4:3 aspect.  A nine-and-a-bit inch screen isn't bad.  Sort of A4-ish and large bookish.  Anything much bigger gets cumbersome.

Do I think the JooJoo is serious competition to the iPad, or just trying to ride on the iPad's coat-tails?

The latter.

Perhaps if they'd kept Arrington in the loop, it might have been a better pad/tablet.  Arrington's still closer to the pulse of where tech is going.

As it stands, I doubt I'd buy a JooJoo.

In this case, iPad by a clear knockout.

Would readers find a JooJoo an alternative to the iPad?  Let's hear your own thoughts.

 

Ease of Use

I don't mind gadgets or OSes that have some built-in difficulty, just so long as they're intuitive to work out.

However, I still have memories of trying to get a Windows PocketPC 2002 phone working to access the Internet and having to use a non-intuitive method of doing so.  Other phones of the time weren't as hard to set up for the same task.  Sure, you had to have a rudimentary understanding of how they achieved it, but once learnt, it was intuitive.  Not so, back then, on a Windows phone.

When I'm talking to Windows pundits, it's a favorite example to bring up to show some things Windows aren't as "user-friendly" as they're made out to be.

Of course, this week I'm bitching about how unintuitive it is to sort power-users in Google Buzz into some form of filter and/or label.

The easiest and most intuitive thing I can manage there is to get buzzes out of my inbox and into a "My Discussions" label.  What's not intuitive is being able to put buzzes from Robert Scoble, Mashable, Techcrunch and Louis Gray into a "power-buzzes" label.  I think I've tried multiple variations of their names and even moused over their profile names to find their google name to input into the "from" box in the filter.  No dice.  Instead of going to their own separate label, they're still showing up in the main Buzz label.  The Google Help files in this case could be more...helpful.

There's no way inside a buzz to just checkbox these names into a label.  Now THAT would have been the INTUITIVE way to do it.

It doesn't mean you're stupid if you want a way that helps you understand and do intuitively.  The word "intuit" means you're able to figure it out in some logical, sensible fashion.

I sit there in the meantime getting frustrated with a non-intuitive way to sort things and have to waste valuable time trying to track down a solution instead of writing.

Let me know if you have similar frustrations with devices and/or programs that are counter-intuitive.