after the massive failure of the original JooJoo (not that they will admit that) Fusion garage is back, they have a new OS that they have built form the ground up they have the grid 10 tablet and the grid 4 smartphone.
The grid OS is what powers both of these new products, Fusion garage said they built it from the ground up from android source, but it’s not an android tablet that has been re-skinned , they said the grid OS uses android like Mac OS X uses UNIX, there is hardly any connection so don’t think of it as an android tablet,though it can run android apps and comes pre-loaded with the amazon app store (still think it should be called the Amazone, would be so much cooler). Everything in the Grid OS is based around, yes you guessed it ,a grid, lots of square, a single home screen which all your apps are on, organised into clusters, you can expand and hide these clusters organise them how you wish and remove apps from he pre-made clusters and into your own, like WebOS and blackberry’s implementation of QNX , the Grid OS is gesture based without and buttons, for instance, there is no unlock slider in android and iOS , no ring in WebOS or in Sense 3.0, you scribble a sign to unlock it, apps like the browser are described as being “chrome-less” because you can hide all the eye candy and have full screen browsing. there is lots of fancy animations in the Grid OS like a falling block of cubes to go back to the home screen and a sort of waterfall to go to the browser etc. very graphics intensive.
Grid 10
Fusion garage showed the Grid OS on the Grid 10 first, their 10.1” tablet with what they claim to be the highest resolution on any 10 inch tablet at 1366x768 they have achieved that and i cant say it looks wonderful because i haven’t seen it yet but i can say that from the video stream it looked wonderful when hooked up to the projector, by what looks strangely like a VGA cable but its most likely a HDMI cable running to the projector, its powered by an NVidia Tegra 2 dual core chip clocking in at 1.2GHz, it has 512MB of RAM which seems a bit low, but we don't know if the software is optimised to that it might run as smooth as butter, this runs the Grid OS but a slightly more full featured version than the Grid 4 does, simply because of its bigger screen the WiFi version of the Grid 10 is said to cost $499 with the 3G Chip adding $100 costing $599 for the WiFi and 3G model, you can pre-order them on amazon at this moment in time with a release date named as “soon” more details when i get any.
Grid 4
now this came as a surprise to everyone who watched the event, everyone knew that there was going to be a tablet unveiled and about half an hour before the unveiling even happened TabCo’s twitter account accidentally said that they were making the equivalent of the JooJoo 2 . The Grid 4 has a pretty standard 4” WVGA (800x480) screen, it also has a dual core processor, but this one is a qualcomm processor either at 1GHz or 1.2GHz as found in the EVO 3D, sensation etc. The Grid 4 also comes with fusion garage’s new Grid OS but an ever so slightly “gimped” version, some features where taken away, purely because it would have hindered rather than helped the end user experience. the 16GB version of the Grid 4 will cost $399 unlocked and will start to ship in Q4, no word has been said o whether this will come to Europe. it has a 5MP rear camera will a 0.3MP video calling camera up front as well even though we have no idea if this has video calling baked in.
Oh, and did i mention Chandra Rathakrishnan said everybody who bought a JooJoo will get a free Grid 10, yes all three of you will get a $499 tablet free, good for you.
call me sceptical, but i have a feeling that this will fail,not because its not a good device because it is, and not for the fact that fusion garage had to make a fake company because the knew that after the JooJoo no one was taking fusion garage seriously, its purely based upon the fact that the basic consumer is stupid, they need buttons to tell them what to do, they wont remember all the swipes they need to do, they buy the ipad and Honeycomb devices (yes even honeycomb has no Physical buttons, there is always buttons in the bottom left corner of the screen) because there is always a way back home tat they know without having to learn it.
-Dom
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