The $200 touchscreen tablet known as the CrunchPad has morphed into a $500 device called JooJoo.

Designed and developed by a Singapore-based company, Fusion Garage, JooJoo is tablet-like device made for internet surfing and little else.

Wired.com got some hands-on time with the JooJoo. At 2.4 lbs, JooJoo is a lightweight, slim tablet with a vivid, crisp 12.1-inch touchscreen display.

Beautiful Hardware, Fast Boot-up ——————————–

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__JooJoo has a capacitive touchscreen, which means it is about as responsive as an iPhone touchscreen and as much of a delight to use. There's also an LCD screen that supports high-definition content. Overall, it measures about 13.3-inches deep, but has a slimmer profile than Apple's Macbook Air.

JooJoo runs a custom operating system built by Fusion Garage and boots in just under nine seconds directly to a homepage screen. It's fast and takes the user directly to services that they may use.

The homepage screen is divided vertically into three sections: Be connected, Be informed, and More apps.

Under the 'Be connected' tab, there are web services such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube among others.

The 'Be Informed' tab features sites such as The New York Times, Reuters, AOL and CNN.

More apps has icons that link, for instance, to Google docs, Yahoo and Hulu.

Now here's the weird part, a default option on the device called 'Paint me a new background' changes the homepage screen color to a new one every time you come back to it. And screen colors include red, violet, green and yellow – all of which seem rather bright and a tad harsh.

The good news, says Fusion Garage, is that users can always uncheck the option and set it to plain white. Still, it's rather puzzling to us why Fusion Garage would offer this feature.

JooJoo is also thin in the number of ports it offers. There's just one USB port. It also has a standard headphone and microphone jack.

User Experience —————

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__Fusion Garage has designed the user experience on the JooJoo. It's elegant in that it's simple and easy to use.

The pre-loaded icons let users click on them to get to the homepage of popular sites such as Flickr, Linkedin, Gmail or Facebook.

To surf the web, there's a URL tab at the top of the screen. Click on it and a virtual keyboard pops up where you can type in the address of the web page. The URL tab also has shortcuts for Google, Google Maps, YouTube and Wikipedia. For instance, type in an address into the URL tab and you can click directly on the Google Maps to pull up directions.

The two-finger zoom out gesture lets you switch between different tabs. The pinch to zoom-in gesture takes you back to the homepage screen.

Users will also be able to bookmark pages they like and check their browsing history, although both those features were not available in the pre-production units we saw.

JooJoo supports Flash so you can play HD video off sites like YouTube. But it only has Wi-Fi connectivity. That means unless you are in a hotspot with blazing fast Wi-Fi, the tablet can seem terribly slow.

The accelerometer means you can display web pages in both landscape and portrait mode, and it automatically reorients the display when you rotate.

Fusion Garage hasn't revealed details about the kind of processor the device uses. But there were moments when JooJoo felt slow to respond and just a little buggy–the device had to be restarted twice during the time we played with it.

Too Much for Too Little ———————–

__ __JooJoo is an interesting gadget only if you buy into the premise of a completely web-oriented lifestyle. That means using just the internet and what it offers. There's no way to save documents locally or access .pdf files or create documents and presentations locally. You can't play offline games, either.

JooJoo runs a custom OS created by Fusion Garage, which means it's unlikely to have the cool apps from independent developers that made the iPhone a hit or juiced the PC ecosystem.

For now, though JooJoo seems to have the hardware design and form factor right, the list of what it can't do outweighs what it can.

Pre-orders for JooJoo will start Dec. 11.

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Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com