Joo Joo CrunchPad tablet

Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad tablet is now the Joo Joo tablet. Fusion Garage has finally come clean with its side of the story in regards to the CrunchPad debacle, and just unveiled its new Arrington-free version of the device: the Joo Joo. The way Fusion Garage tells it, the device was already in the works at the time of the original TechCrunch post about the idea, and that Michael Arrington and co. made zero contributions to the development of the device — and apparently don’t have any sort of contract to prove otherwise. The device is much along the lines of what we’d been hearing: it runs a UNIX-based OS, boots straight to a web browser (otherwise no apps at all), weighs about 2.4 pounds and features a 12.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. There are no physical buttons on the slate outside of the on-off switch, which taps into a 9 second boot time. Under the hood there’s a 4GB SSD, WiFi (no 3G), an accelerometer and about 5 hours of battery life. Pre-orders start on December 11th, with a dream-shattering $499 pricetag bringing this thing back into the realm of reality.

Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan, founder and CEO of Fusion Garage, unveiled today the hardware that was to be the CrunchPad.

It is now named the JooJoo, an African word for magic.

It will be available for preorder this Friday at TheJooJoo.com.

Details:

It will cost $499. It has a $12.1 inch capacitive touch.
Chandra says the device will take 8-10 weeks to ship.
He says there will be sufficient quantities to meet demand.
He says there are retail partners coming in the future.
The battery will allow you to stay online for 5 hours.
It is WiFi only.
The operating system was built from the ground up. It boots up in nine seconds.