On Monday, the enigma that was TabCo came out of hiding, revealing itself as Fusion Garage. (Fusion Garage, if you remember, was the company behind the JooJoo.) On Thursday, we got to spend some time with the Fusion Garage folks, as well as the company's newest products, the Grid 10 tablet and the Grid 4 smartphone.
The first thing CEO Chandrasekar "Chandra" Rathakrishnan demonstrated for me was the Grid 10, a 10-inch tablet that runs Fusion Garage's own Grid OS. It's a long, thin, good-looking tablet, but it was definitely heavier than it looked. The 1,366-by-768 display is large and bright, but it was extremely reflective, and didn't have the best viewing angles. Physically, there's not much about the Grid 10 to differentiate it from Android tablets like the Acer Iconia Tab A500. The Grid 10 has 16GB of internal memory, and will be available September 15 for $499 with Wi-Fi or $599 with Wi-Fi and 3G.
Next was the Grid 4 smartphone, a device that I actually quite liked. It's a bit blocky, but has a big, bright, 4-inch screen, 16GB of internal storage, and runs the same Grid OS as the Grid 10. It'll be sold unlocked initially, for $399, but should have carrier support in the future. It ships in the fourth quarter of this year.
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The Grid OS operating system is completely unlike any other tablet operating system on the market. For better or worse, Fusion Garage certainly scores points for its uniqueness. The operating system is built on top of the Android kernel, and can thus run Android apps through the Amazon AppStore, but it neither looks nor feels anything like Android. (Rathakrishnan compared it to the way Mac OS is built on top of the Unix kernel, but bears no resemblance to Unix.)
The home screen is particularly interesting; instead of one or several homepages filled with icons or widgets, when you go to the home screen you see a giant, endless grid of your applications. You can move them around as much as you want to, and create folder-like Clusters that expand and contract with a tap. My immediate response was that finding apps would be hard on this giant grid, but Rathakrishnan pointed out that it's all customizable, and you can make your grid as large or as small as you want. Personally, I still prefer the paginated look and feel, but the grid was snappy, good-looking, and is, once again, something different. The grid also worked much better on the tablet than the phone, which required a lot more moving around to find apps and Clusters.
Four things define the experience of using the Grid OS as a whole. First, there's animations: after virtually any action, tap, gesture or touch, some wild animation happens while the tablet moves from one thing to another. Rathakrishnan likened the approach to Apple's, where every action has a reaction, and every care is taken to make those actions and reactions pleasing to the eye. Whether that's achieved here, or the animations will be at best an annoyance and at worst a way to slow down your use of the device, remains to be seen. But color me skeptical.
The second key feature of the Grid OS is the "wheel." One of Fusion Garage's many slogans during the TabCo PR blitz was that it was "reinventing the wheel," and while this wheel probably won't have quite the cultural impact of the other one, it's a neat feature. All menus exist in a wheel that pops up next to the content you've tapped, or highlighted, and provides lots of contextual options right at your fingertips. In the demo, Rathakrishnan had some trouble getting the wheel to show up, but once it did it worked fine.
That's where the third selling point of the GridOS comes in, which Fusion Garage calls "intelligence." All over the device, in any application, the Grid OS tries to guess what you want. If you highlight the word "Inception," the wheel pops up giving you links to the movie's IMDB page, a link to buy it from Amazon, and much more. Tap a location, and you'll be able to see restaurants nearby, or get directions to that place. In only a few minutes of use it's hard to tell how robust this feature is, but it's an extremely clever idea.
Last, but very much not least, is the Seamless Sync feature. This only really makes a difference if you buy both the Grid 10 tablet and the Grid 4 smartphone, but it's as compelling a reason to stay in an ecosystem as I've seen. If you're watching a video, or editing your home screen, or browsing the Web, all your changes automatically get synced through Fusion Garage's SkyGrid software, which then syncs everything down to your other device. If you pause a movie on your tablet, and then pick up your phone and select the same movie, it'll take you right to where you were before. All your browser tabs will be present, as will any changes you made to your home screen.
That's not all, though: nearly everything is different here. There are no buttons on the device, which relies totally on gestures; two fingers swiped down from the bezel take you home, two from the right bezel take you back, and so on. Once I knew them, the gestures worked well, but I continually question the real-life usefulness of the gestures; if I hand my tablet to someone, do I really want to give a five-minute explanation on how to use it?
Everything from media controls to menu presentation looks different, often in very good ways (see the slideshow for more). One thing you can't say about the Grid OS is that it's not flashy; it very much is. But that flash might come at the expense of performance: In a few minutes of using the Grid 10 in particular, it experienced a mix of lags (going from an app to the home screen was particularly slow), misses (taps and pinches went unrecognized a few times), and general sluggishness. Rathakrishnan assured me that the unit I saw had only half of the memory that the production unit would have, which might explain a few of the performance woes, but my advice here is to tread carefully.
Fusion Garage is working hard to repair its reputation, to prove to the world that it's learned from the JooJoo and is ready to be a real competitor in the tablet market. The company is larger now (over 100 people, up from 14), better-funded, and clearly believes in itself. It has certainly made an interesting play with the Grid 10 and Grid 4, not to mention a bold one, but whether it's enough to bring Fusion Garage out of the garage and into the Apple-dominated tablet landscape, only time will tell.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391356,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000762
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