After spending some time with the JooJoo, the new name of the embattled Crunchpad, I'm more a fan of the device's potential, than the device itself.

After spending some hands-on time with the JooJoo, the new name of the , I would say that I'm more a fan of the device's potential, rather than what it actually is.

The JooJoo isn't a mystery; boot one up, and within eight seconds you're staring at a somewhat clunky interface on the 12.1-inch touch screen, with large, bold shortcuts to a number of Web sites and Internet apps. But time and again, whatever I wanted to do with the JooJoo was frustrated either by the interface, or the hardware, or the Wi-Fi connection at the San Francisco hotel where Chandra Rathakrishnan, Fusion Garage's chief executive, demonstrated the $499 device.

The Web tablet remains a white whale of the technology industry; Microsoft tried it, but the 's dependence on handwriting recognition banished it to the shadows of convertible tablets (or into the ). So far, remains a fanboy's fevered dream. Keep in mind that, in the JooJoo's case, "Web tablet" means "Web consumption tablet," and aggressively so. Mild content creation, such as the addition of a picture to a Twitter tweet, isn't possible with the JooJoo unless the photo in question is already somewhere on the Web, such as Flickr.

Rathakrishnan calls the JooJoo's price an appropriate one for the Web tablet space it has pioneered. I can accept his argument that a customer may want to pay $499 for a trail-breaking product. But the next time that customer visits an electronics store and sees all the netbooks and ultraportables priced at $499 or below, will he regret it?

Simple and straightforward

I found the JooJoo comfortably light for such a large tablet, with rounded, molded corners that seemed easy enough to grip and rest in your lap. An included stand also holds the JooJoo at one of two angles, depending on how it's oriented.

Unfortunately, the startup screen is also the source of one of the tablet's great annoyances: the irritating choice of background colors. Instead of a fixed white background, the JooJoo cycles through annoying shades of green, purple, and yellow each time the home page is accessed. Fortunately, unchecking an option box eliminates these hideous backgrounds.

Fusion Garage has aligned a series of icons on the home page, virtually all of which simply access the corresponding Web page. The first category is "Connect," with icons for Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others; next is "Have Fun," with YouTube, last.fm, MySpace, and AOL; "Be Informed" adds The New York Times' Web page as well as Google News and Yahoo. The latter category slides over to the right, off the page, prompting the user to slide over to the new page by swiping a finger near the bottom of the page.

And that's annoyance number two, in my book. I confess that I'm not a veteran swiper; I use an Android or BlackBerry Curve smartphone, rather than the ubiquitous iPhone. Still, swiping should be intuitive enough that it should work, and it does sometimes. I couldn't always quite figure out where to swipe to move the screen left and right.

The real problem, however, is that the pinch gestures navigate up and down the navigation tree. Pinch out, as if expanding the window, and the JooJoo jumps back to the home screen; pinch in, and a user can access a different app or Web page that is already running via a tab. As I'm used to some hardware control in my mobile browsing, the pinch gestures frustrated me, and the touch screen seemed to lack the necessary sensitivity at times. An additional gesture input may solve the problem, Rathakrishnan agreed; in my book, if Apple has already broken up the border of the iPhone with a dedicated "Home" key, then Fusion Garage has license to do the same.

One mild success is the software keyboard: click a text entry box, and a large, touch-enabled keyboard pops up. Data entry is straightforward, and the device helpfully adds a ".com" key when entering a Web address, something I wish Google's Android phones would do.

The JooJoo's screen rotates from portrait to landscape mode and back again, and Web pages reconfigure as well, as you might expect. In portrait mode, for example, scrolling up and down each Web page is a pleasant experience. But I noted that the home page GUI doesn't rotate, leaving a gaping white void at the bottom of the screen.

Annoyance number three was the lack of response when browsing the Web. The 4GB SSD hosts the Linux based OS, underneath a Webkit-based browser, pretty standard for mobile devices today. Granted, the JooJoo I tried was surfing the Web on a shared hotel Wi-Fi connection, which Rathakrishnan said had become progressively slower as the night wore on. Fair enough. But he also said that the device slows down in the presence of Web sites with a number of pictures, such as eBay. That seems to indicate that the JooJoo will work best with simple, straightforward sites like Gmail, with its minimalist interface. But the JooJoo is a media-consumption device, and I think users will want to seek out graphically complex sites to entertain themselves.

As far as I could tell, browsing the Web works fine if a user wants to hopscotch from link to link on a Web page. But the Webkit browser eliminates the URL field when loading the page. Trying to load a random site (say, www.toyota.com) from a completely unrelated one (www.ibm.com) means pinch-widening back to the home screen, then typing in the new Web address. That's a bit of a pain. I didn't see any way to add additional icons or bookmarks to the home page, but I suspect that capability will be added to the final production model, if it's not there already.

Interestingly, Flash-based sites, such as Hulu and YouTube worked well on the JooJoo, although I didn't try out any Flash-based game sites to truly test the platform. (Rathakrishnan said that the JooJoo will run Flash apps, but not how.) It's also not clear how plug-ins will be handled, although Rathakrishnan said that the JooJoo can save cookies, to eliminate the need to perpetually re-enter login information. I wouldn't be confident in opening up a banking site without a more intensive investigation of how the JooJoo handles secured Wi-Fi connections.

Fortunately, Rathakrishnan promised that the JooJoo will offer software-based updates that will be pushed to the user, so even minor annoyances and bugs could be fixed quickly. Will they? That's one of the bets a first-adopter makes with an untested company.

I've left the hardware specs until last, as Fusion Garage seems to want to downplay them.

The JooJoo's hardware is minimal; on one side a small power button boots the device, next to a USB connector for a keyboard, mouse, or combination of the two. The USB connection could be used to load media onto the JooJoo as well, although Rathakrishnan said that that capability is on a future feature list, and not currently available. The limited RAM and storage means that large files can't be copied onto the on-board 4GB SSD. A card-expansion slot, currently present, won't be featured on the final device. The current iteration of the JooJoo features 802.11g Wi-Fi; the shipping version will use 802.11n, Rathakrishnan said. A configuration screen on the pre-production model also listed Bluetooth as an option.

He declined to specify what processor the JooJoo uses, perhaps correctly arguing that the user will be focused on the experience of the device, rather than its processor  an argument Apple has used with some success in its own portable devices.

Rathakrishnan described the current iteration of the JooJoo as a preproduction model, close, but not quite finalized. If nothing else, the parade of eager journalists will provide some useful feedback; my appointment was at 7PM, and Rathakrishnan was scheduled to end his night with a 10PM appointment.

It's almost impossible to discuss the JooJoo without referring to the histrionics that has surrounded its evolution, from an intriguing concept to a to suddenly a . According to Rathakrishnan, Fusion Garage has partnered with a second Taiwan ODM who will be able to meet the demand for any and all pre-orders, he said. Although Michael Arrington, the owner of TechCrunch, has , Rathakrishnan reiterated what he : that no suit has been filed against Fusion Garage (which has incorporated in the United States), that the company owned all of the intellectual property surrounding the device, and that Arrington's role was simply to market and promote the device, nothing more. (Arrington has since decided to let his lawyers settle the matter.)

All that aside, I'd like to believe that there's a market for a Web tablet, especially with the growing number of Wi-Fi enabled airplanes. But for now, I'm not sure that the bugs and issues with the JooJoo justify its price.

If nothing else, however, the TechCrunch tussle has rekindled interest in the JooJoo, and allowing hands-on time with the device was a shrewd move. While I don't claim to be the expert that some of our other analysts are, I think I know a successful device when I see one. This isn't it. But with the feedback from some of the industry's top analysts and bloggers, the JooJoo may morph into the device people expect.