Fusion Garage Grid10 Pro Reviews

If you're going to go out of your way to bypass an established option like Honeycomb and do your own thing, your own thing had better be damned good. The Grid10 isn't even pretty good. It's borderline pretty bad. Software performance is sluggish, battery life is atrocious and we're left with a device that simply fails to beat the best of the Android tablets -- never mind the rest. It's far, far better than the departed JooJoo, but still a huge disappointment for us. We like a good second-coming story as much as the next guy and were genuinely hopeful that the rough, early versions of GridOS we saw would be polished into something new and exciting, but what we have is still crude and clunky. We're always hopeful for the future, but we fear no amount of polish could make this thing shine. So this, then, is a second-coming that shouldn't have been, leaving us shaking our heads in dismay yet again, wondering whether anybody else can step in and crack the kings at the top.

This is pretty simple: although Fusion Garage is to be commended for developing a novel new operating system with a slew of interesting and innovative UI features — something few other companies have ever done — the Grid10 as an integrated package of hardware and software simply doesn’t measure up. The display alone is so poor as to utterly ruin the user experience, and Grid OS lacks the level of polish, stability, and performance it needs to compete against iOS and Honeycomb. (And it certainly doesn’t have the price tag to match up with the Amazon Kindle Fire.) That said, it’s clear Fusion Garage (and its mysterious investors) are committed to developing a serious tablet competitor — we’ll see what another year brings.

The Fusion Garage Grid10 has a unique interface that is ultimately the major barrier to enjoying using the tablet. Bad performance and low-quality components don't help.

It would have been very easy for Fusion Garage to simply slap Honeycomb onto the Grid10 and leave it at that, so we applaud the company for taking a huge leap in creating its own user interface. And to be sure, there are a lot of great innovations, such as the smart browser controls and contextual menus. The Heartbeat is another stand-out feature. However, the learning curve will be too steep for many. We'd like to see Fusion Garage streamline the interface with future updates so you don't need a map on the home screen. From a hardware standpoint alone, $299 for a 10-inch tablet is a bargain. Just know, though, that the Grid 10 will require some patience.