I read about the unfortunate death of the Crunchpad last week and after I’d gotten over my initial sorrow for Mr. Michael Arrington, I swiftly moved on… forgot about the ill-fated, seemingly never to be realised project and turned my mind to thinking about the new Google OS for netbook, Chrome OS (AKA The Chromebook) – the eagerly awaited project (and no doubt much harder to derail than the Chrunchpad!)
The netbook operating system Google plan to launch next year does, on the face of it, sound like a very similar project to the Chrunchpad – proprietary linux build, promised boot time of less than 10 seconds, a device built of the web and for the web… with some apparent limitations: Fusion Garage have now slated the 11 Dec 2009 as the launch date for the new device, with a new name – somewhat bravely titled – The JooJoo.
The JooJoo is designed in part as a video viewing device, but unfortunately in the demo we got, the Wi-Fi network we were on wasn’t robust enough to support the video Rathakrishnan wanted to display. The few seconds of video we saw before the system stopped to buffer looked great, but if users buy this device expecting to be able to watch HD video in their hotel rooms all the time, we recommend that they either reset their expectations or avoid hotels like San Francisco’s St. Regis, which apparently doesn’t give its guests sufficient bandwidth.
More from the CNET Review here
I have no idea of the legalities of what will follow between Mr. Arrington and Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan, I for one though would urge them to solve whatever difficulties they have now though… before Google comes to the party and cleans up with a tablet version of the Chromebook.
