Earlier this summer, a company called TabCo burst onto the scene with videos, skywriting (yes, really), and the promise that it was "reinventing the wheel." What and who TabCo actually was, however, was still unknown. Until Monday, anyway.
On Monday, a number of things became clear. TabCo is just Fusion Garage, the company famous for two reasons, neither of them good: a feud with TechCrunch, and a widely panned tablet, the JooJoo. And the wheel that Fusion Garage is "reinventing" is two wheels, actually: the tablet and the smartphone.
In what appeared to be a pre-recorded press conference, Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar "Chandra" Rathakrishnan demonstrated both the Grid 10 tablet and the Grid 4 smartphone. Both are built on the Android kernel, but look nothing whatsoever like Android. The devices are designed to work together, using features like Seamless Sync, which syncs your place in a video across the two devices so you can pick up where you left off.
The Grid 10 is a 10-inch tablet, with a 1366-by-768 display. It packs an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor inside, in a Wi-Fi-only model for $499 or a Wi-Fi/3G model for $599. Both models are available today for pre-order, and will ship September 15. Rathakrishnan also noted that all JooJoo owners will receive a free Grid 10, to show owners how far Fusion Garage has come.
The Grid 4 smartphone has a 4-inch, 800-by-480 screen, 16GB of internal storage, and will cost $399 unlocked. It will ship in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Both devices run Fusion Garage's Grid operating system, built on top of the Android kernel. As Rathakrishnan demoed the devices, he showed off a number of unique features, even on the unlock screen: Instead of swiping or dragging to unlock the device, you sign it with your unique signature to open it up. Once open, you'll see the Grid Desktop, which is a giant, endless grid with apps and icons on it that you can scroll and pan through to find apps. The Grid Desktop uses expandable "clusters" of apps, which work much like the folders on iOS devices. The devices will run Android apps via the Amazon App Store, as well as through Fusion Garage's Own Grid Shop app store.
Rathakrishnan demonstrated the email application, the browser, and the general use for much of the two devices. Gestures abound on the device, which has no buttons; everything from going to the home screen to switching tabs in the browser is done with gestures. The "wheel" is a key element in the operating system: A tap in almost any application brings up a wheel next to your finger, which contains all the necessary controls.
Though we'll reserve real judgment until we can put the devices through their paces for a full review, it's hard to have high hopes for the Grid products, especially considering the hype that the TabCo promotional campaign heaped onto the company. At various points in the "press conference," Rathakrishnan compared the Grid products to Apple and Android products and operating systems, and in as many words said Grid was better. Plenty of the interface elements looked slick and well-animated, which likely means Fusion Garage learned its lesson from the buggy, crash-prone JooJoo, but this product seemed to be anything but easy or intuitive to use.
PCMag has a meeting scheduled with the TabCo/Fusion Garage team later this week, so stay tuned for our hands-on reports with the Grid devices.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391108,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000762
No comments:
Post a Comment