Surprise surprise. Wired reports that Fusion Garage’s new Grid 10 tablet and Grid 4 smart phone are remarkably usable, marred by only a few glitches that need to be ironed out before the devices are ready for prime-time.
The Wired hands-on piece notes that the devices are built on Android, but use a different interface style than any other Android device. The interface is built around a grid-like scheme, with a sliding window that moves around over a desktop bigger than the whole screen can display at once.
Fusion Garage re-thought much of the tablet experience, all the way down to the controls for the music and video players. Instead of the traditional horizontal status bar showing where you are in a video (think YouTube), it’s a circle, with the play/pause button in the center. The volume slider also is curved, to the right of the circular video control. It looks nice, but it takes up a little more real estate than the conventional layout. When you’re playing music, the audio controls can be reached via a small icon in the upper right hand corner of the device.
The glitches Wired noticed had to do with the slowness of an interface based entirely on swiping with no physical buttons, and the web browser’s occasional habit of crashing. But since this was a demo unit, some glitchiness was to be expected. All in all, it’s a surprisingly positive review for a new device from the company whose first tablet effort was considered “bad JooJoo” all around.
