Saving up for that iPad? Maybe you should check out the JooJoo first.

JooJoo? That’s one of a host of tablets in one stage or another of development or release. In fact, in the next year or two we’re going to have more tablets than a hypochondriac’s medicine chest. Some compare favorable to Apple’s iPad in price, power, specs and features. If you’re willing to do a little comparison shopping it might be worth waiting and sitting out a dance or two before making your choice of slate or tablet.

Gizmodo has made it easier to do that shopping with a post called Slate Showdown: iPad vs. HP Slate vs. JooJoo vs. Android Tablets & More

Here’s the short version:

The iPad has the most storage, cheap 3G, the time-tested iPhone OS and its mountain of apps, and a serious amount of Apple marketing juice behind it. But it’s also famously lacking features common to the other tablets, such as webcam and multitasking (only first party apps like music and email can multitask). The Notion Ink Adam is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, with its dual-function transflective screen from Pixel Qi: It can be either a normal LCD or, with the flick of a switch, an easy-on-the-eyes reflective LCD that resembles e-ink. Its hardware is also surprisingly impressive—but it remains to be seen if Android is really the right OS for a 10-inch tablet.

The Dell Mini 5 and forthcoming Android edition of the Archos 7 tablet are two of a kind, almost oversized smartphones in their feature sets. Is an extra two or three inches of screen real estate worth the consequent decrease in pocketability? Perhaps not. And finally, there’s the maligned JooJoo, formerly the CrunchPad, a bit of an oddball as the only web-only device in the bunch. It doesn’t really have apps, can’t multitask, and pretty much confines you to an albeit fancy browser, sort of like Chrome OS will. The JooJoo is also the only tablet here to have no demonstrated way to read ebooks.

If you want to read about any of these in detail, click on the links below.

Apple iPad: [Gizmodo]
HP Slate: [Gizmodo, GDGT; Tipster]
Fusion Garage JooJoo: [Gizmodo]
Notion Ink Adam: [Slashgear]
Dell Mini 5: [Gizmodo, Gizmodo]
Archos 7 Android: [DanceWithShadows, Gizmodo]
Lenovo IdeaPad U1: [Lenovo, Gizmodo, Gizmodo]
Archos 9: [UMPCPortal, Archos]

By the way, do you know the difference between a slate and a tablet? Nobody does – the terms seem to be interchangeable, but the Gizmodo guy likes “slate” if for no other reason than “tablet” is overused.

RC