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back to article O2 drops Joggler family tablet

O2 is severing support for its 7in Linux-based tablet, the Joggler, at the end of the month. The touchscreen gadget, launched in 2009 and pitched as punters' "new fridge door", was aimed at folk looking for technological help in keeping their family life organised. O2 Joggler This week, O2 began pushing a firmware update to …

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  1. Jon Press

    Nice idea, poorly executed

    Don't suppose the lack of ongoing "support" will make much difference, it's not been particularly visible over the intervening years. Even the things that could have been easily fixed (such as the clock display being too bright at night) were left to hackers whose efforts were then erased in the rare event of a firmware update - which would result in a noisy interruption in the middle of the night. The digital radio lagged minutes behind the live stream and would periodically skip entire sentences as it struggled to synch up. The DLNA client (bizarrely not an app but hidden amongst the "tools" menu) rarely managed to scale content up to a full screen. The box would often reboot itself as an alarm approached - or lock up altogether. And it was prone to brick itself.

    A little more attention to detail and it could have been a very useful little device - but that goes for so many transient gadgets. I don't see how O2 ever imagined it would generate revenue for them, though.

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  2. Anonymous Coward 15

    Has all the required open-source code been released?

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  3. Dave Horn

    Not all that bad...

    I have three Jogglers (bought when they were £50) and they're used exclusively with the excellent SqueezePlay app running on them. This is getting even better with what the developer calls "Squeeze OS", which is a bare-bones Ubuntu installation that does nothing but fire up into SqueezePlay.

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  4. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Barstewards

    Dropping support is fair enough but to 'firmware upgrade' to something else as a parting shot isn't at all nice. I guess I'll know if I've blocked upgrades or not next time I plug mine in.

    The real shame is the Joggler was pretty nice hardware, just too expensive until knocked-down to £50 and not open enough that it was useful. I never had any joy getting Ubuntu to work well and it was such a niche device that it wasn't that well supported by a user community. It makes a nice Squeeze Player and runs Opera Mobile Browser ... unless the firmware upgrade trashes that ability.

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    1. Mage Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: Barstewards

      Erm.. the stuff they are replacing relies on their services and simply won't work at all soon.

      What they are doing sounds reasonable.

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  5. Michael Baines
    Linux

    It certainly was apalling out of the box but some TLC it is quite a nice little media player. I used to run Squeezeplay on the Joggler OS but switched to XBMC on Linux Mint quite recently.

    Go to http://joggler.exotica.org.uk/ for a few, easy to install, choices.

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  6. Chad H.

    EA could learn something from this

    This is the way to do a service shutdown... A final push that allows you to retain as much functionality as possible after the servers are turned off.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Squeezebox

    If someone gets hold of any surplus stock of Jogglers and starts selling them off, I'd take a look, especially now I've read about Squeezeplay.

    I wouldn't mind a "bargain-basement Squeezebox" in the kitchen to add to our existing network (we already have a Duet in the lounge, running off a Synology NAS), especially if I could land a Joggler for £50 or so - less than half the price of an SB Radio...

    Sounds like I might be too late, though - aside from eBay, anyone know where I could find one of these?

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