JooJoo: The Pill That Beat Apple To Market, Solely To Be Discontinued

Produced in Singapore by an organization referred to as Fusion Storage, the JooJoo was a Linux-based pill that was launched on March 25, 2010, solely to be discontinued a bit of greater than six months later, on November 11, 2010. Initially referred to as the CrunchPad, the pill was created by Michael Arrington, founding father of TechCrunch, who began improvement on the mission in 2008 and aimed to create a light-weight web-based pill marketed at a low worth level to the plenty.

From the beginning, nevertheless, there have been issues. Just a bit below a 12 months into improvement, the CrunchPad group teamed up with Fusion Storage and its CEO, Chandra Rathakrishnan, which appeared to go properly at first. A brand new Prototype C was created, that includes a glossy, minimal {hardware} design and boasted a Linux-based working system. Early iterations of the {hardware} resonated with the tech neighborhood.

Nonetheless, cracks began to type by the top of July 2009: The corporate introduced that the pill wouldn’t promote at $200 as initially deliberate, however $400 (finally, the pill would debut at $500). The mission was additionally subsequently delayed with little to no communication from the corporate to the general public.

Whereas prototypes did obtain constructive suggestions from media on the time, issues throughout the group would start brewing. This finally led to the fallout of the companions and the CrunchPad being re-branded because the JooJoo, as Arrington was faraway from the mission and refused to offer the {hardware} with any media or publicity.