Fusion Garage worked hard to release the Joojoo in time for Apple's iPad launch, but in its haste, the firm may have cut too many corners.

On the outside all seems well. The Joojoo has some elegant design flourishes and the tapered edge make the device a less of an immediate strain on the palm than the iPad. However it doesn't take long to realise that the device, with a 12.1in screen, isn't a handheld. Weighing in at 1.1kg, we'd recommend not to try and hold it aloft for any length of time.

The screen itself is technically inferior to that of the iPad, being a twisted nematic (TN) panel as opposed to the iPad's in-plane switching (IPS) unit. The difference is clear, the viewing angle of the Joojoo is limited, with text and colours becoming a pink mush if the device is tilted. When within the viewing angle, colours are well produced and the pixel density doesn't seem to impact negatively on text.

Given that the screen sports a widescreen resolution of 1366x768, videos can be watched without the letterboxing found on the iPad. Coupled to the increased screen size, the device actually provides a better video experience than the Apple device.

As the Joojoo supports Adobe's Flash, YouTube works as it would on a desktop or laptop. The Joojoo offers a version of the YouTube player that enables certain videos on the site to be accelerated by the device's Nvidia Ion chip. We were told that in the coming months all videos on YouTube, regardless of their encoding format, will be decoded by the Ion chip.

Video playback did cause the device to whirr up its fans. Given the nature of the device and where it will be used, the fan noise, though not rampant, is highly undesirable. Clearly the fans do a good job as in our tests the device didn't get particularly hot.

The Joojoo has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor, coupled with its Nvidia Ion chipset, this makes the apparently sluggish speed of the operating system and web browser even more disappointing. The transitions seemed slow and many screen presses went unnoticed. Transition between portrait and landscape mode was often painfully slow.

This could be down to the beta nature of the software but given that the firm is asking £320 for the Joojoo, you can't help but feel that the software has been rushed out the door. The firm has said that it will be employing an aggressive update strategy, though at this point, such a move seems a necessity.

As the Joojoo "applications" are really just web bookmarks, the device is truly an internet tablet. Opportunities for tech-savvy customers to extend the usability of the device exist, but in shipped form, the Joojoo is at present nothing more than a web consumption device.

The Joojoo clearly offers more potential than Apple's device, with commodity hardware, a USB port and the ability to modify the operating system. However its biggest problem is the slow and buggy interface the device ships with.

Unless Fusion Garage can fix this and get the most out of the formidable hardware beneath the screen, the Joojoo is unlikely to pose any threat to the iPad.

Author: Lawrence Latif

04 May 2010