JooJoo: The year-long road to nowhere

6. JooJoo: The year-long road to nowhere

The JooJoo tablet was plagued by bad juju from the get-go. It seemed like a good idea when TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington began talking up his dream of building the "Crunchpad" Web tablet, and a partnership with a company called Fusion Garage to bring such a product to market.

But when the JooJoo tablet (at right in the image) was finally announced, in December of 2009, the tech world was already looking forward to the imminent release of Apple's tablet, announced the following month. The iPad shipped in April 2010, before deliveries of the JooJoo could ramp up. Combined with the impossible task of competing with the iPad's fit and finish was Fusion Garage's public and bitter breakup with project instigator Arrington. And did we mention that the actual user experience with the JooJoo was none too great? This tablet was designed purely as a Web client, with its own proprietary OS, and it was slow. And then tablets based on Google's Android started to appear.

Fusion Garage's litigation with Arrington lives on, but the JooJoo tablet is dead. The company has reached a deal to sell its unsold tablets to a third party, which will repurpose them into tablets for vertical industries, possibly with another operating system. The company plans to ship a new line of renamed tablets based on its own fork of Android. They'll be smaller and hopefully cheaper, and they'll support apps. The JooJoo line, however, is gone for good.