Alright, so we gave you the opportunity to rant and rave on Apple’s iPad last week, and it’s only fitting that Fusion Garage’s much-anticipated JooJoo go next. To date, it’s pretty safe to say that quite a bit less (we’re understating things here, obviously) JooJoo tablets have been sold than the aforesaid iPad, but that’s not to say none of you have one. On the off-chance that you actually are the proud owner of a JooJoo, we couldn’t be more eager to hear how you’d tweak things if given the golden opportunity. Would you make the screen a touch smaller? Alter the exterior design in any way? Swap the CPU or GPU? Toss on a different operating system? Force it to use iTunes like only a true sadist would? Go on, the floor’s yours — throw down your best advice in comments below.

We’re not sure what’s harder to believe: the fact that after months and months of the soap-opera-like drama that the JooJoo (formerly known as the CrunchPad) has finally landed in our hands, or that within just a few days there are now two capacitive touchscreen, browsing-heavy slate tablets on the market. Sure, it’s probably not the best timing for a tablet start-up, but that doesn’t diminish our interest in the 12-inch, Flash-playing JooJoo. The JooJoo is meant to be a browser-based tablet for surfing the web on your couch or while traveling, but with little previous hands-on time, we’re still wondering how well it’ll really work. And, obviously, whether or not it’s a $499 experience on par or superior to Apple’s iPad. Fear not, we’ll tell you all you want to know in our magical review after the break.

Well well. We’d always suspected that the JooJoo tablet was hiding something extra to run HD video and Flash, and it’s just hit the FCC with full documentation and a teardown confirming that there’s an NVIDIA Ion GPU paired with an Atom N270 packed inside. We’re also seeing a 3G card in there, although it’s unclear whether it’ll be active or installed at launch — we’ve been told the 3G version won’t be ready until sometime later this year, but things have been changing fast, so that may be in flux as well. There’s also a picture showing it running Windows, but we’re assuming that’s just for testing purposes — we’d also bet it’d be an easy little hack. But back to Ion for a second: our experience with first-gen Ion netbooks has been one of decreased performance and drastically reduced battery life, so we’re very curious to see how the JooJoo holds up compared to modern netbooks running Intel’s Pine Trail chips and NVIDIA’s Optimus-based Ion 2. We’ll see — it’s supposed to ship in just a few weeks. Two more pics after the break.

P.S.- Oh, and Fusion Garage got back to us yesterday with a list of supported local video formats, and it’s pretty decent: AVI, MPEG-4, MOV, WMV and WMA, FLV (Flash Video), VOB, OGG, OGM and OGV, MKV (Mastroska), DiVX and XViD. We’ll see how the battery holds up, though — our very own Joanna Stern predicts a best case of 3.5 hours with WiFi on and a video playback time of two hours.

The JooJoo tablet’s launch date might have been pushed back a month while Fusion Garage sorts out issues with the capacitive touchscreen, but it looks like the extra time has given the company a chance to tweak the interface and add in some features. Obviously the most noticable change is the revised homescreen, which has gone from line art on a garish solid color background to a nicely rendered icon grid over a high-res customizable wallpaper, but Fusion Garage has also ditched the confusing pinch-to-go-back gesture and replaced it a vertical swipe that brings down a status bar containing the home button, status indicators, browser navigation controls, and a combination address bar / search field. Scroll behavior has been revised as well, with two separate behaviors: a two-finger scroll that works like a scroll wheel, and a single finger “pan” that works like a mouse arrow. That’s so you can move around sites like Google Maps, which have different interface elements mapped to each control — CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan pointed out to us that devices like the iPhone avoid the issue by using dedicated apps, but Fusion Garage wants to deliver the “full web experience.” It’s an interesting solution and a clever spin on things, but we’re waiting to try it out for real before we pass any judgment.

What else? The text-entry situation has been improved: there’s now both a smaller keyboard designed for one-handed operation that can be moved around the screen so it doesn’t obscure content, and a full-screen multitouch keyboard that does chording so it recognizes more than one key at a time. There’s no auto-correction or prediction, though. Flash is now fully working, and YouTube videos can either be played back using Flash or the custom H.264 HD breakout player we’ve already seen; that player supports a range of codecs and can also be used to play videos stored on a USB thumb drive. And finally, and perhaps most oddly, the JooJoo has changed colors. Instead of black, the back casing is now a “champagne” color, a picture of which you can see below — Chandra told us that unhappy preorder customers can just have their $499 refunded if they desperately wanted black instead. All we desperately want to do is get a review unit and tell you what the JooJoo is actually like to use — if all of these promises hold up, it could be very intriguing indeed.

Call us optimistic, but we pictured February 25th rolling around with us laying on a couch and watching some Olympic ice dancing clips on the JooJoo’s 12-inch screen. Ah, but here we are about to cross off the last few days of the month and the only thing we’ve got in our hands are some tissues and hot cocoa. Promising to ship units to those who pre-ordered in December within 8-10 weeks, Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan told us just a month ago that it was on track to ship before the end of February. However, when we called them up to see what the deal was we were told they’d have a shipping update for us by the first week in March. Additionally, when asked if there were delays with production or shipping the first units to customers we got the never fun “no comment.” We’re going to go ahead and assume there’s been some sort of delay — perhaps JooJoo primary investor CSL has been too busy updating the BlueBerrry KIRF line with an optical pad to write out the check for the manufacturing costs. Okay, that’s unlikely, but we’d love to hear if any of those that pre-ordered have heard differently or anything at all.

Well, that didn’t take too long. Just a day after we pondered the shipping status of Fusion Garage’s JooJoo tablet, the company’s come clean and told us shipping will delayed to March 25 because of a manufacturing issue with the tablet’s 12.1-inch capacitive screen. Yep, it looks like it’s going to be at least 27 more days until you’ve got a JooJoo of your very own — which means, of course, that Fusion Garage will now be trying to launch this thing during the same week Apple’s scheduled to launch the iPad. Ouch. To its credit, Fusion Garage says it’s not happy with the delay and has promised a free accessory to pre-order customers to make it better — we’re told it’s likely to be the $30 stand. We’ll see if that’s enough to hold back the effects of Cupertino’s coming media blitz, but either way we’re quite excited about making a tablet sandwich at the end of March. Full PR after the break.