Ever since we first got word of TabCo, we’ve been a bit intrigued as to what it will be bringing to the table(t). Well, the cat is out of the bag and guess who it is? It’s Fusion Garage – the makers of the late JooJoo tablet. We must say that it’s been a well-played game of, “hype up our product,” and the upcoming tablet and smartphone needs to show a lot of promise so it won’t be immediately dismissed.
The Grid 10 ships with the specs of your standard Android Honeycomb tablet. Unfortunately, it’s not running Honeycomb at all and ships with a heavily customized skin running on top of it. The skin, called the Grid UI, is said to be unlike anything available on a tablet today. Well, we’d believe that if we had never heard of the EXO PC, which rocks a circular grid instead of squares. This is heavily fleshed out Android here, and you won’t find the Market, Google apps, Android browser, or even Google search installed on the tablet.
The hardware on the tablet isn’t bad, however. Shipping with the NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor, we at least know that this tablet will be one snappy piece of machinery. The 10.1 inch display has a resolution of 1366×768, which is higher than your average Android tablet but we can’t say that it will make us choose this over, say, the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
The tablet will run you $499 for the WiFi-only version, and another bill will give you the WiFi/3G version. You can pre-order the Grid 10 on Amazon starting today and it should ship in the middle of September. Also announced was the Grid 4, an accompanying smartphone with a Qualcomm dual-core CPU, 4 inch display (480 x 800), 16GB of memory, and will run you $399 unlocked.
The Grid 10 reminds us of other super-hyped tablets that inevitably failed to impress, original JooJoo notwithstanding.
Honestly, there’s little to be impressed about these devices and we’re going to go ahead and call them crap. We’re going to get some hands-on time with the Grid 10 today, so our opinion may change but we now see why Fusion Garage was hiding behind another name and trying to create hype for its mystery device.