Fusion Garage JooJoo review

For a touch-operated operating system it’s annoying that navigating forwards and backwards through a website requires tapping incredibly small buttons on the pull-down control panel at the top of the screen. This also gives you access to the address bar, so you can type in a website of your choice. Bizarrely, there’s no way to start a new browser window and visit a website of your choice; instead, you have to click on a homescreen icon or bookmark, launch a new window and then type in the URL of your choice.

The bookmark system feels flawed in another way: tapping an icon or bookmark opens a fresh browser window every time. With apps, tapping the icon for a running app would just bring you back to where you left off; JooJoo’s method means you can end up with loads of open windows.

One of the selling points of the JooJoo was its multitasking, but this is a bit of a misnomer, as all it means is that you can open up multiple browser windows and switch between them. The iPad can already do this and will have full multitasking later in the year with iOS4.

Where the iPad and Android-based tablets really win out is with Apps and local storage. As the JooJoo has neither, you can only view content when you’re online. This means that you can’t take the JooJoo on a train and read a book or look through your digital photos, for example, unless there’s a WiFi connection available. It massively detracts from the tablet’s usefulness. If nothing else we’d have at least expected to see applications to play music and videos, view photos and read documents. As it stands the JooJoo is basically a brick when there’s no internet connection.

The one advantage that JooJoo has over the iPad is Flash support, which makes every website viewable in full. Even this isn’t perfect, though, and we had problems with YouTube. Videos with a 360p or 480p resolution played fine in a window, but were jerky full-screen, while 720p (essentially, the JooJoo’s native resolution) and 1080p videos become slide-shows. With Nvidia ION graphics inside, we really expected better.

Overall the JooJoo is a deeply flawed product that’s incredibly frustrating to use. If you really want a tablet, this is possibly the worst £319 that you can spend. It’s slow to use, misses several key, but minor features, such as the ability to edit bookmarks, and is completely useless without an internet connection. The iPad may be quite a bit more expensive, but it’s easier and quicker to use and works offline. If you haven’t got the cash to spend, we recommend waiting for the inevitable slew of Android-based tablets to come out.