VentureBeat has a short interview with Chandra Rathakrishnan, head of Fusion Garage, which is the company making the Joojoo. If you need to refresher on the device and its interesting background, take a look at our recent article.
Fusion Garage has been taking orders for the 12.1 inch tablet on their website since December. The stated timeframe on their site has been 8-10 weeks ever since they started taking pre-orders, but since then we haven’t heard if everything was on track. In VentureBeat’s interview, Chandra confirms that the Joojoo’s will be shipping on time and says that they’ll “…be in consumer hands by the end of February. inch We’ve still yet to see one with release-candidate software.
A few other bits of info from the interview Chandra won’t give out exact numbers on pre-orders but that they had exceeded their expectations. He also spends some time trying to score points against the iPad, noting that it has full flash support as well as a larger, higher resolution screen with a 16:9 (1366×768) format instead of the iPad’s 4:3 (1024×768).
Chandra also has the following to say about wireless networking on the device: “We are not ruling out the possibility of 3G in the near future. inch While they might not be ruling out the possibility, I’m finding it hard to believe that Fusion Garage would be able to strike a deal as valuable as the one that Apple currently has with AT&T, in which it will cost users $30/month for 3G with no contractual obligation on the iPad. If Fusion Garage creates a 3G equipped Joojoo, it’s likely that they’ll sell it unlocked and let you find your own service.
Matt Buchanan has a story on Gizmodo saying that he spoke with Chandra as well. His article has an interesting tidbit about a Fusion Garage app store:
The other big news is that they’re planning on opening a web app store. Chandra says that one of the iPad’s advantages over JooJoo was the App Store, which made app discovery easy through categorization. The JooJoo take is that “the internet is the largest app store,” and what they’ll be doing is categorizing all kinds of web apps in an “app store” to make them easy to find.
Of course it isn’t quite an app store as they won’t be selling anything — it’s more of an app database which will categorize and help users find useful web apps. Not a bad idea in my opinion; if people can go onto a big database of web apps and search for “Microsoft Office inch and find a list of online alternatives, I think it could be very powerful.
I’m hoping that we see some footage of a retail Joojoo (both hardware and software) soon. Stay tuned.
