Fusion Garage’s New Tablet Aims to Shake up the Market With a New OS
Mysterious tablet company TabCo kept the tech world guessing after a series of successful viral video campaigns promised that they would reinvent the Tablet wheel. While having planes write "Forget the fruit" in the sky outside Apple's WWDC conference didn't tell us a lot about the company, it did at least show that they must have a decent level of financial backing (or financial wasting). Now, finally, during a web conference, all has been revealed.
"Here to shatter the sameness of the tablet genre", Fusion Garage previously created the JooJoo, a poorly performing and poorly developed tablet. Fusion Garage admitted that their first product was flawed, but – in what is an awesome move – all owners of the original tablet will get the new product absolutely free.
According to company head Chandra Rathakrishnan, Fusion Garage has raised "tens of millions of dollars" in an attempt to ensure that their product is not a simple iPad clone. Instead of using purely Android, the new operating system used the Android kernel to develop 'Grid', which is "like nothing else out there". Apps are arranged on a grid, and you can place the apps into clusters instead of folders like on iOS. As expected, all interactions will be gesture-based. It will also support split-screen programs, so you can watch a movie and surf the web.
To anger Google even more, the Grid OS has been developed with Bing integration built in, rather than Google search. The browser also offers a "Chromeless browsing experience" which removes Google's browser from the web experience if you wish.
The Grid OS powers the Grid 10 tablet, which will have the highest resolution of any tablet currently on the market (1366×768), and a high end processor (a Nvidia Tegra 2 Dualcore). There's also a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, 16GB of storage, Bluetooth 2.1, and a microSD slot. Grid 10 will support the Amazon App store and the Grid Shop, and it will support Android apps.
The Grid 10 will cost $499 with WiFi, $599 with WiFi and 3G, and launch on September 15th.
On top of that, there will be a Grid 4 phone that ships in Q4 unlocked for $399 that will run the same OS and have a 800×480 screen and a Qualcomm dual-core processor.
Will the Grid 10 become your gaming tablet of choice? Share your thoughts in the comments below.