Last month, Fusion Garage outed its Grid 10 tablet. The device was supposed to ship September 15, and carry prices of $499 for a Wi-Fi version and $599 for 3G. The company is now accepting orders for the US for the 10.1-inch tablet, but with an expected October 1 ship date and prices of $299 and $399 respectively. The Grid 10 incorporates an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core 1GHz processor. The 10.1-inch display is a dense 1366×768 touchscreen. It sports a single 1.3-megapixel front facing camera.
The front face–a 10-inch screen surrounded by a 1-inch glossy bezel–looks sleek and minimalistic. The matte black plastic back is curved, similar to the Acer Iconia A500 tablet, making the Grid10 seem thinner than it is. The Grid10 Logo in chrome is a nice touch.Measuring 10.8 x 6.8 x 0.4 inches, the Grid 10 has similar proportions to the ExoPC, and it’s one of the larger tablets to come through our labs. Only the ExoPC (11.6 x 7.6 x 0.6 inches, 2.2 pounds) is larger.
Still, the Grid10′s design makes its 1.5-pound weight feel lighter than it is.The left side has a headphone jack, a proprietary charging port, and a microSD card slot, and the right side has a power button. There’s no HDMI port, but Fusion Garage sells an adapter that connects to its proprietary port.
The 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 display on the Grid10 is ideal for watching HD movies, most of which now have a wide-screen aspect ratio. While the screen was a bit of a fingerprint magnet, viewing angles were wide enough for a few people to cluster around the device. Audio is definitely not one of the Grid10′s strong suits; the speakers were barely audible and quite tinny. Also, their placement–on the lower left and right sides–causes them to be covered up by your hands when you’re holding the tablet in landscape mode.
Fusion Garage deserves credit for trying to craft something that stands out from Android and iOS, but ultimately, it’s not as intuitive as either. The section in the reviewer’s guide on using the grid runs 24 pages alone.
Forget passwords. You can lock the Grid10 with your signature, which is potentially far more secure than just numbers and letters alone. Plus, it’s a lot more fun. After entering our signature three times, we were able to scribble our name on the lock screen to access the device.
The entire home screen of the Grid 10 is made up of squares; a number of these squares are populated with icons, and clustered into groups based on purpose. For example, the Music cluster has icons for Last.FM, Pandora, Live365, and Rolling Stone.
Initially, the home screen measures 19 x 30 squares, but can expand infinitely. That’s a lot of squares to keep track of, which is why the Grid10 has a small map in the upper right-hand corner, showing where the clusters of icons are located. Even so, we spent a lot of time scrolling around the home screen, trying to remember where things were. You shouldn’t need a map to navigate your tablet.Swiping with two fingers from the top of the display returns you to the home screen. A two-finger swipe from the right lets you go Back; two fingers from the left opens the Heartbeat, which is like a dashboard.
The Grid10′s keyboard is plenty spacious, both in landscape and portrait mode, and we like that there’s haptic feedback as well. However, in landscape mode, the Grid10 is so wide that it’s difficult to press keys in the middle without stretching your thumbs.
Powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor with 512MB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, the Grid10 performed well on our synthetic tests. In An3DBench, it scored 7,535, about 600 points higher than the category average. Its Linpack score of 34 was a hair above average (33.1), and its Benchmark CPU score of 2,503.7 was about 200 points below average.
The Grid10 lacks a rear-facing camera, but that’s fine by us; nothing looks more ridiculous than someone trying to film using a 10-inch tablet. The front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera on the Grid10 delivered crisp, if slightly muted, colors both in photos and videos.
Fusion Garage estimates that the Grid10′s 5800 mAh battery should last about 7 hours. On the LAPTOP Battery Test (web surfing via Wi-Fi), the tablet lasted almost exactly one hour less: 5:56, which is also about one hour less than the tablet average.
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