JooJoo Turns Out To Be Legit, Gets Torn Down.

The JooJoo exists. With all of the recent media coverage of the iPad, we’ve had a chance to hear some interesting discussion and heated debates. Usually the more tech savy and the hackers are most upset about the “closedness” of the hardware and software. We have heard of many alternatives, but usually they’ve been pretty clunky. The JooJoo(originally “crunch pad”) by Fusion Garage gets mentioned, but we’ve been avoiding it since the company had been having so many set backs, we doubted it would actually exist. Well, it does. The shipped the first ones at the same time as the iPad.

What is so special about it? well, heres what you’ll find when you open it up (yeah, with screws).

  • a RAM slot, 1 GB provided
  • 2x mini pcie slots
  • 1x ssd slot
  • a 3g sim slot
  • Nvidia’s new ion graphics chip
  • An atom n270 processor

With 4 Gb of storage, bluetooth, wifi, a camera, external USB ports, a screen boasting 1366×768 resolution, and a slick interface which supports flash, we can’t help but get excited. It costs $499. We think this could be a fantastic hacking platform. We aren’t going to just run out and buy one yet, but if it takes off, we expect to see people hacking these like crazy. Too bad they couldn’t have gotten a little more press to compete with the iPad.

IPad Teardown

Its been quite a while since we’ve featured something from iFixit. But when we saw they had torn apart the next greatest Apple product, the iPadreleased today, and how everyone on our team loves it, we thought why not also let our user base enjoy the destruction informative teardown as well.

In both the original and the FCC teardown, we see some awesome features and tricks Apple implemented. Most notably the two separate 3.75V lithium polymer cells, not soldered to the motherboard, allowing users to easily replace the battery if need be. However, in the opposite respect, more components than ever are being epoxied to the board, making the iPad much more rugged.

We’re left wondering, with everyone able to see the beautiful insides, does it change anyone’s mind on getting an iPad? Or would you rather make your own?

Eat Your Heart Out IPad

We don’t remember where we read it, but our favorite criticism of the iPad is that is does the same things a lot of other Apple devices do. So why wait until April to get your hands on that functionality? [Alexbates] built his own iPad clone using existing hardware and software. This started with an MSI wind that he used as a hackintosh. A touchscreen was added to the display, the keyboard removed, and the LCD flipped around. Boom, a tablet running OS X was born. This is different from others because [Alexbates] took the time to alter the UI to look like the iPad. Sure, it doesn’t automatically flip the display when rotated and there’s no pinch-zooming. But it does have more processing power and storage space.

We’re more likely to hack our own like this rather than purchase a device we’re not all that enthusiastic about.

[Thanks Jadon via Engadget]