No this is not a Malaysia clone of the Ipad or its clone. This is a rather interesting new twist to the JooJoo/Crunchpad incident.
In case you missed out, Fusion Garage(FG), a Singaporean company was supposed to partner with Techcrunch to launch their version of the Ipad called the Crunchpad. A few days before the launch, Michael Arrington announced the death of the Crunchpad. What happened after that was FG decided to launch the product by themselves and renaming it the Joojoo.
With an impending case with Techcrunch, FG was taking pre-order and announced they received a new round of investment and a partnership with a South East Asia mobile player. This “major mobile player” is no other than Malaysia’s own CSL group. According to their site, “CSL is a leading and most established mobile phone service company in Malaysia”. CSL group is a retailer, service provider and currently manufacturing mobile devices and netbooks.
Their carry their own range such as the Blueberry and the Nseries netbooks.
With this partnership, CSL will be their manufacturing partner for the Joojoo and we will expect to see the device in the market by end of Feb.
When asked by SgEntrepreneurs on the Ipad, Chandrasekar said with the bigger screen and faster loading time, the Joojoo will be formidable and he thanked for opening up the market as pre-order of the Joojoo pad has increased since the announcement of the Ipad.
We have yet to get any comment from CSL when this article was published.
To find out on some of our thoughts on the Crunchpad Joojoo incident, listen to ThisWeekinAsia Episode 5
