Remember Fusion Garage, the company behind the JooJoo? That thing kind of went absolutely nowhere, but the company is back with another product – well, two products to be exact, or three if you want to get pedantic (and I’m nothing if not, you know, that). The Grid10 is a tablet, Grid4 a smartphone, and GridOS the operating system. It all looks pretty awesome, and is supposed to come out October 1. The Grid10 for a mere $299, and JooJoo owners will get one for free.
Let me state right out of the gate that as far as design and looks go, the Grid10, Grid4, and the GridOS is very different from anything else on the market. It is, clearly, inspired by Metro, but it does give its own unique twist to just about everything. I’m obviously not sure how well it will work in real life, but it at least looks pretty good.
It also does a few interesting tricks, software-wise. The home screen is unlike anything you’ve seen before (check the video from Engadget below), and looks pretty neat. When you highlight a word anywhere on the device, you can tap on an icon to open a pie menu with all sorts of actions; look the word up in a dictionary, search the web, open Wikipedia, and so on. Other interesting tricks are the ability to start playing a video on the tablet, pause it, and then continue where you left off on your phone.
GridOS is based on Android, but while it retains the Android Linux kernel and Dalvik, everything else is custom. While Android application will run on the device, it doesn’t pack any Google features (it uses Bing, even). In other words, no Android Market access, but it does come with the Amazon App Store and Fusion Garage’s own application store.
Hardware-wise, the Grid10 is no slouch. It’s based on an Nvidia Tegra II 1Ghz dual core processor, and sports 512MB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and all the usual wireless options and ports. The screen has a 1366×768 resolution. The Grid4 phone, on the other hand, uses a Qualcomm MSM8255 processor (a 1Ghz Snapdragon), 512 MB of RAM, and a 800×480 display.
“There’s really been no innovation since iOS. Everything has been a carbon copy of the Apple devices, and Android has largely been that. If you’re trying to copy and you’re a poor carbon copy, you’re not going to succeed, and I think that’s what happened in this space,” Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan told PC Pro, “Pricing is also a very important factor. At $499, why would you buy – it’s like going to China and buying a [fake] Louis Vuitton bag, at the same price as the real Louis Vuitton bags. It doesn’t make sense, when you know it’s a rip-off product.”
While I would say that iOS itself isn’t particularly innovative either, his point is still largely valid – the smartphone and tablet space are dominated by operating systems which try their darn hardest to be as conservative as possible (except for Microsoft’s Metro interface, ironically enough), so I’m personally very happy to see Fusion Garage be all bold.
Now, the question is going to be – will anyone buy this? The public at large will obviously be pretty oblivious to the whole JooJoo fiasco, so they’ll look at the Grid10/Grid4 without prejudice, which is a good thing. However, the mobile industry is clearly going towards a situation not entirely dissimilar from the desktop world (one dominant operating system), and I’m afraid that with HP not even trying, and with Microsoft still failing to sell any significant quantity of Windows Phone 7 devices, Fusion Garage is going to have a very, very hard time.
In any case, they certainly get an A+ for effort alone already, and I’m wishing them all the best. Let’s hope the software is up to snuff (often a difficult point for small hardware companies like this), because the hardware seems decent enough. I’ve inquired about loaning a review device, but with OSNews being very small compared to the likes of Engadget & Co., we’ll have to see if our request is honoured.
I doubt this will be a success in its current form. The tablet/phone space already has too many gigantic companies with no space for the little guys.
However, there is some hope that these ideas will survive by being integrated into Android or Windows Phone. Maybe Google or Microsoft will buy these guys.
It’s important that people keep trying to innovate, but pushing these features out as an update to an already-mass-market product is the key to success in such a cut-throat space.
Well, it runs Android apps, which should make it an option for a lot of people looking for phone or a tablet. Not cooperating with Google and not getting standard apps does not seem clever, though.
I’m not sure anyone would be able to buy them out. According to Arrington, they have a pretty messy ownership arrangement. And there is the joo joo/chrunchpad fiasco. I think that whole lawsuit may be in the courts still. If a major player were to buy Fusion, they’d be buying the risk of the judgment from that.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/crunchpad-end/
Any OS shell that requires a ‘map’ to navigate is implicitly too complex.
agreed. why would we want to have to go and search for the apps we want when there are otherways that let us find out app quicker and with less frustration?
+1. Sometimes, designers should listen to their subconscious when it tries to patch ergonomic flaws.
Sorry completely off topic but as soon as i read JooJoo i immediately thought of Prof Farnsworth from Futurama looking for his gargoyle zoo zoo.
On the topic of the device i think they make be able to pull it off by leveraging the Android platform, although i do agree with the review it has a hint of Windows Phone 7 about the design.
I wonder if every part of the OS extensively uses 3d graphics whether that battery life will suffer?
“(and I’m nothing if not, you know, that).”
But we don’t care about Thom Holwerda.
We want OS news.
“We”? Speak for yourself, dude. OSNews is a blog, and Thom’s personality is part of what makes it a daily visit for me. Yeah, I like the news, too. 🙂
Funny how fitting your nickname is.
Or did he miss the point that HP’s machine sold out when it was $99 a unit? If it was $150 it probably would had sold as fast and at $200 it may had slowed down to taking two weeks to a month to sell out.
However, $299 is still not cheap. Yes, it is cheap compared to an Ipad. But my Toshiba netbook costed the same, lasted 10 hours on batteries, offered not only a keyboard, webcam and sound/mic jacks but also three(3) USB ports to plug in an external keyboard, mice and an external drive at the same time. It even included a SD card slot.
Yes, tablets are not notebooks but the price of this one is high enough to get people to stop and compare devices first. Don’t forget there are lots of other tablets already available in this price range. So either they get a small share of the market or they need to hire the same people who do Apple’s marketing.
Apple has taken most of the people with money to spare in their pockets, the JooJoo past has killed the early geek adopter market who will pay higher prices to be first, and HP has shown there are lots of others out there with less money in their pocket who are willing to buy cheaper models.
If they can drop the price to $199.99 I am sure they will have a winner.
Edited 2011-09-13 12:28 UTC
Agreed. Still priced too high. Then again, I think all the current tablets are quite a bit overpriced….
It seems they actually wanted to sell the Grid10 at $399 initially.
http://liliputing.com/2011/09/fusion-garage-grid-10-tablet-price-dr…
I’ve read all comments and I think some are rather harsh when it comes to the UI. I am not into tablets and don’t intend to ever buy one. But I’m wondering, have people set their expectations so high that they can’t enjoy new things? People, lighten up and lose some of that jadedness.
Anyway, I am really blown away by this interface. The UI is not only new. It is innovative in my book and it seems polished. I’ll probably borrow a bunch of ideas from that video.
A few awkward lags in the tablet’s reaction to some moves, though.