In remarkably brave timing, Singapore-based start-up Fusion Garage’s JooJoo tablet is in the hands of the few customers who pre-ordered it. The JooJoo debuts the same weekend as the Apple iPad.

Here’s a first look at the device.

JooJoo fundamentally requires you to buy into the idea that you need a third device, beyond your smartphone and laptop. Ironically, the JooJoo seems almost Apple-esque in its hardware and user interface design. The $500 tablet–priced at almost the same as the entry level iPad model–is one of the better looking devices I have seen recently. But by its own sense of timing, the JooJoo has set itself up to comparisons with Apple iPad and it doesn’t beat that benchmark. Overall, the JooJoo feels like it is a year too late to market.

Sleek Hardware But Nowhere Close to Perfection
Powered off, the JooJoo feels polished and sophisticated. Turn it on and the 12.1-inch capacitive touchscreen springs to life in just a few seconds. The device has just one USB port and a standard headphone and microphone jack.

At about 2.5 lbs, the JooJoo feels comfortable when resting on the table or if you want to carry it around for a short time. But since comparisons to the iPad are inevitable, the JooJoo is almost a pound heavier than its rival. (See the tech specs of the device.)

What the JooJoo seriously lacks in terms of hardware design is a home button–similar to what the iPhone or iPod Touch has. Every once in a while, when you are on a page and want to go back to the home screen, it’s not easy to do so, without a home button. It’s an industrial design flaw and one that JooJoo needs to find a way to fix.

The JooJoo only offers Wi-Fi connectivity (there’s no 3G access) nd its easy enough to search for wireless networks and log on.

The biggest problem with the device, so far, that I can see is the battery life. In less than three hours of using the device–where we just had the browser open and no video–the JooJoo had lost more than half its battery charge. Fusion Garage says JooJoo can offer 5 hours of battery life–about half of that of the iPad.

Also, switching in and out of stand-by mode can be difficult, as the screen just goes blank and the device needs to be often restarted.

User interface Needs Work
JooJoo runs a custom operating system based on Linux and boots very fast. Once powered on, it directly takes the user to a home screen, from which you can go anywhere on the internet.

JooJoo’s homescreen is divided into little square icons that connect directly to services such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook YouTube and major news sites such as The New York Times and CNN.

But there are some puzzling design problems. For instance, there’s no easy browser launch icon from the homescreen. Instead you have to type in the URL of a site into a floating navigation bar at the top of the screen–which can take a frustrating first few minutes to figure out.  Fusion Garage says that’ s because the JooJoo is a browser-based OS and you don’t have to launch the browser icon like you do on the desktop or the laptop.

The onscreen virtual keyboard is easy to use. It can be dragged and positioned anywhere on the screen but it doesn’t stay locked in that position so you have to do it for every new page. What’s missing though are small features such as the automatic capitalization of a word at the beginning of any sentence and predictive text input.

Scrolling requires two fingers, instead of a single finger scroll that iPhone users are familiar with. That said, once you are on a webpage, scrolling is very smooth and videos play beautifully–thanks to the included Flash support.

What doesn’t portend well for the JooJoo is that the device doesn’t feel zippy. It has a 1.6 Ghz Atom processor and a Nvidia Ion graphics unit but still feels sluggish, especially when switching between screens.

And while iPad users will have access to 3400 apps the minute they turn their devices on, JooJoo customers will just have to live in an app-less world.

Still the JooJoo is an impressive effort by a company that’s never done an hardware product before. Unfortunately, its up against a better product in the iPad and it will take a miraculous feat of engineering and marketing to convince potential customers to buy a JooJoo instead of the iPad–something I don’t think JooJoo can pull off.

See Also:

• JooJoo Tablet Gets a Makeover Before Launch
• JooJoo Tablet Faces Uphill Battle Against iPad
• Hands On With the JooJoo, Formerly Known as CrunchPad
• JooJoo Tablet Set to Ship Around Same Time as iPad

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

View full post on Wired: Gadget Lab