JooJoo CEO: This is just the start of tablet era

This morning, Apple iPad tablets made their way into the hands of non-celebrity Americans who had read about them for months, and had seen them on prime-time TV this past week.  Another tablet computer, the JooJoo that began life as a discussion on TechCrunch, also made its way to buyers’ hands this week.
VentureBeat met this morning with JooJoo maker Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, CEO of Singapore-based company Fusion Garage that builds and sells the JooJoo. Rathakrishnan — known as Chandra to most people — gave us his own hands-on impression of the iPad and talked about the future of tablet computers.
“The iPad feels heavy for its size,” he said, noting that it’s more than twice as heavy as an Amazon Kindle. The JooJoo weighs the same as an iPad, but has an extra couple of inches of display pixels — 12.1 inches in a widescreen layout, instead of Apple’s squarer 9.7 inches.
Chandra says the iPad’s scrolling is nice, as is its pinch-to-zoom gesture that makes it easy to resize Web pages. He thinks Apple’s decision not to support Adobe Flash technology — used by an estimated 75 to 90 percent of video clips on the Internet — made it easy for Apple to ignore a lot of video support problems that JooJoo engineers are still working on.
For example, you can’t watch Hulu TV and movie clips on an iPad. The JooJoo handles Hulu awkwardly, but at least you can watch. Both iPad and JooJoo play YouTube clips reliably by using dedicated players rather than trying to display the video inside a YouTube Web page.
But JooJoo’s most newsworthy design decision is that there are no apps for it. It loads only Web pages and Web interfaces served by opening a URL. “Our app store is the entire Internet,” Chandra says, only half joking.
“We are not competing with Apple” is one of his talking points. Of course he’s competing with Apple, but he’s not doing it by copying their products. Instead, Fusion Garage is building an API to let software developers do novel things with the JooJoo, such as storing books and movies on it for offline viewing.
It’s a step short of publishing the company’s source code for its Linux-kernel operating system, as Google does with its Android mobile operating system. But Chandra hopes the API will tap into the anti-Apple sentiments of software makers who resent being forced to submit their iPad apps to Apple for review and approval, rather than simply posting them when they’re ready.
“We’re just at the beginning,” he said. “We won’t know what people will want to do with their tablets until they’ve had the chance to try them.”
Tags: ipad, JooJoo
Companies: FusionGarage
People: Chandra Rathakrishnan