JooJoo tablet gets its first hands-on

You got all the gritty details yesterday, but the upcoming FusionGarage JooJoo (nee CrunchPad) tablet has now officially been fondled by those outside of the company. And you know what? It looks pretty slick!

For a while now we've been keeping an eye on the CrunchPad — a tablet geared towards browsing the Internet while sitting on the sofa — though last month it looked like it was all over for the niche-y computer with Michael Arrington, Mr. TechCrunch himself, declaring the tablet dead.

The CrunchPad has resurfaced amidst a flurry of drama and legal action as the decidedly blandly named JooJoo, free of Michael Arrington's name or any TechCrunch branding. According to Fusion Garage, the company that partnered with TechCrunch to help realize the CrunchPad/JooJoo, the tablet could launch as soon as this Friday.

It'll feature a 12.1-inch touchscreen and reportedly boots in a scant nine seconds. Unlike your computer, which experiences a slower boot time the longer you use it, something like the JooJoo — which won't run any applications save for a browser to surf the net — that's a boot time that may actually stay nice and low for the life of the unit. It also has a virtual keyboard, Wi-Fi (no 3G), a 4GB SSD, five hours of battery life and it weighs 2.4 pounds. The JooJoo can be preordered for a whopping $500, double what was originally projected during the early phases of the CrunchPad.

It's weird. Back when this thing was the CrunchPad and Arrington's baby, I was excited. Now that it's the JooJoo and Arrington has been booted, I find I couldn't care less. It now comes off as overpriced and too narrow in scope. I guess it's just a case of mom's grilled cheeses always tasting better — she just puts more love in 'em.

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