Skip to main content

Fusion Garage’s Joo Joo Tablet Carries $499 Price Tag

Aside from the mythical Apple tablet, few non-existent devices have generated quite the buzz of the so-called CrunchPad, a device allegedly dreamed up by controversial TechCrunch blogger Mark Arrington so he could surf the net from his couch. Hardware engineering had been underway on the CrunchPad for some time—with Arrington repeatedly lauding its virtues and promising rock-bottom price tags—when the whole project seemed to go pear-shaped last week, with Arrington declaring the project dead and partners Fusion Garage apparently planning to move ahead with the device on their own. Today, Fusion Garage is making good on that, teasing a tablet device it is calling The Joo Joo that promises to put Web browsing on a large, lightweight touchscreen tablet.

Fusion Garage Joo Joo
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Although details are still a bit sketchy, Fusion Garage describes the Joo Joo as a tablet device with a 12.1-inch capacitive touch screen display; the Joo Joo runs a Unix operating system and boots directly into a Web browser in under 10 seconds—no other applications are available on the device, although of course users will be able to run Web-based applications. The device connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi—no mobile data service is available—and the device features a 4 GB SSD for storage, microphone and headphone jacks, as well as microSD storage. The device weighs about 2.4 pounds and promises 5 hours of use on a single battery charge.

Fusion Garage will launch pre-orders for the Joo Joo on December 11, with a $499 price tag.

The legal wrangling between Fusion Garage and Mark Arrington seems to be just be getting started. In declaring the project dead, Arrington accused Fusion Garage of stealing its intellectual property, claiming that the companies worked together on the product and neither TechCrunch nor Fusion Garage owned the IP behind the tablet outright. Fusion Garage claims that it has sole ownership of the device, which was already underway before Arrington began musing about his dream Internet tablet, and there was no contractual relationship between the two companies. The whole brouhaha may well be a legitimate legal tussle, a publicity stunt to garner attention leading up to the launch of the device…or perhaps both.

Fusion Garage Joo Joo
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.

Read more