You may not have heard about it amid all the iPad hype, but another take on the tablet has also started to reach consumers’ hands: the JooJoo.
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Before I held a demo model of the JooJoo in my hands in December, I didn’t understand tablets or why someone would want one. The JooJoo made me realize that a tablet could complement — not replace — a laptop and a smart phone and be a far better gadget for watching digital video or reading e-books.
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I was eager to play with the final version of the JooJoo because it sprang from a different philosophy than the iPad, even though both are touch-screen devices.
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Like its sister device, the iPhone, the iPad is focused on task-specific applications. Although it has a Web browser that’s comparable to what you might have on a PC, iPad and iPhone owners often use other programs in its place. So they might use the Facebook application instead of going to the Facebook Web site. And YouTube videos are typically viewed in the iPad’s YouTube program, rather than at YouTube.com.
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In contrast, the JooJoo, created by startup company Fusion Garage, is built entirely around a Web browser. Any applications you might want to use on it have to be Web apps.
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In theory, that’s not a bad idea, because you can do plenty of things on the Web these days. You can get e-mail through Hotmail or Yahoo. You can create a spreadsheet or write a letter in Zoho or Google Docs. You can play games on Facebook or Pogo, watch movies on YouTube or Hulu, and listen to music on Pandora or Lala.
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The JooJoo’s browser, unlike the iPad’s, supports both Adobe’s Flash technology and Java, a popular programming language on the Web, allowing the device to access many more Web-based applications and…