In an effort to "tell their side of the story," erstwhile manufacturers Fusion Magic held a press event yesterday to announce that, yes, , only without Arrington's participation or his original name.
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The new name? JooJoo.
Because, apparently, FooFoo was taken.
JooJoo is an African term for "magical" (I've always seen it spelled "juju," but never mind) and that's , which conforms to most of the specs Arrington's been braying about for months with one key exception: Instead of costing less than $200, the JooJoo will clock in at $499.
So, to recap: The company is selling a running a custom OS that only works on Wi-Fi for the cost of a netbook running Windows and a wireless broadband card. And it's named JooJoo.
Wired's Priya Ganapati did , and found it "elegant" and "simple," though also a bit slow and overpriced. Fusion Magic is planning to take orders later this week (assuming it gets any) and deliver the first JooJoos to customers in 8 to 10 weeks.
But first the company has to get around the 900-pound purple elephant in the room named Michael. My has been and anyone else who's been within 20 yards of them for the past year.
I have a theory about what happened. to work with that his partners finally just dumped him from the project. Per Fusion Garage CEO and founder :
"Michael made many promises suggesting he will deliver on hardware, deliver on software, deliver on -- none of which came true. We had to move on," Rathakrishnan said in a webcast Monday.
The downside for Fusion Magic? Instead of having a very loud bullhorn promoting the CrunchPad (and 600,000 slavish readers lapping up news about it every day), it has the opposite: a sworn enemy who does not hesitate to take editorial revenge for even small slights.
When you're a company nobody's heard of, trying to introduce a new device for a market that doesn't yet exist, with feverish rumors of somebody like Apple stepping in and crushing you -- and you're charging way too much money -- the odds of your survival are slight.
But a (at an affordable price and with a name that doesn't make you smirk) would be a very good thing. So good luck to Fusion Magic -- it'll need it.
Note: In past blog posts I've referred to Mr. Arrington as "Captain Crunch." Cringester S.C. points out that this nickname rightly belongs to , who used a toy whistle from a Cap'n Crunch cereal box to hack Ma Bell. So from here on out, no more confusing the hacking legend with the man who's a legend in his own mind.
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This story, "," was originally published at .