No Camera, no Multitasking GPS on 3G Models only, and Video Limitations.
I heard the following the other day: "The sentence isn't done until no more words can be removed." Apple in general and Jobs in particular are relentless about removing things from products, slides in presentations, and even emails. The Zen philosophy of minimalism thrives there.
Whether you are a supporter or not of that philosophy, sometimes it is hard to argue with the simple logic of their decisions. Below is some text from a review of the JooJoo. After reading the article, I find it difficult to complain too much about the lack of Flash on the iPhone/iPad. Maybe someday Adobe will get it working better, but on CPU and battery constrained devices it isn't a very good choice right now.
Fusion Garage JooJoo review ... But what about Flash? This is supposed to be the big differentiator, right? The iPad killer! In an interesting move, Fusion Garage coupled the Atom processor with NVIDIA's Ion graphics to aid in playing full screen Flash video (or for doing... something). Unfortunately, the software just isn't there yet. Currently the device is running Flash 10.1 beta 1, and won't have hardware-accelerated Flash video for a good while now (the timing is partly reliant on Adobe support, and is labelled as a "work in progress" by JooJoo). That means some regular-sized YouTube and Hulu works, as decoded by the CPU, but full screen Hulu is jittery, and a 720p YouTube clip is like watching a slideshow. In one of the biggest moves of irony, JooJoo has actually implemented a hack for YouTube where you can view a video in Flash or in "JooJoo" mode which is a straight playback of the MPEG video file every YouTube video harbors. What does this remind us of? HTML 5, albeit with a less elegant implementation. This of course only works on YouTube right now, though JooJoo says it plans on supporting other sites in the future. Watch the video below for yourselves to see all this Flash tragedy play out.
The worst part about the Atom / Ion combo is that it results in those original issues we had when wereviewed all those Ion netbooks. First, it causes the entire tablet to get quite warm (especially when playing Flash video) and then it murders its battery life. The JooJoo's integrated three-cell battery repeatedly lasted 2.5 hours (just as we predicted!) during our moderate use, which included surfing the Web and playing short videos. JooJoo claims you can get 5 hours if you avoid Flash entirely, but that sort of defeats the purpose, right? ...
Todd
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