Grid10 review

Second chances aren’t always easy to come back by, and when Fusion Garage disappeared off the map following the unabashed failure of the JooJoo tablet , we certainly didn’t expect those doors could be opening again. But open they did, swinging wide because the company treated itself to a product launch of the kind usually reserved for large-named companies with big-named devices.

This time it is the Grid10 tablet, a $299, 16GB, 10.1-inch slate that plays nice with Android while simultaneously thumbing its nose on the OS Google built, instead counting on the completely custom-built GridOS. This new challenger can run Android apps despite not actually running Android itself, purporting to provide users another, more sensible choice of armament in these tablet wars. Is it truly better, or is it just different? The answer’s expecting you simply after the break.

Hardware

Popping out of the box there is not any reason to think the Grid10 is anything but a high-end device. While packing materials ultimately don’t have any relating the general quality of a given gadget, because the ticket for Fusion Garage’s second chance the Grid10 makes a very good first impression. The box is neatly embossed with a gloss logo on flat cardboard, while the tablet itself comes with a range of crimson accessories that supply some contrast to the otherwise dark, monochrome surroundings.

The red power cord and USB cable depend on a proprietary port that’s situated at the left side of the device. It is a bit narrower than Apple’s own connector, but thicker and, ultimately, a few million times easier to plug something in to. Still, we’d have preferred plain ‘ol micro-USB. Also, we need to show here that the USB cable isn’t included inside the box, and may cost you a surprising $29 if you want one. Yes thirty bucks for a USB cable that you will need so they can push content right on your device.

Also at the left side you will find the three.5mm headphone jack and, below, the microSD slot. Using this you could augment the tablet’s storage and (unlike the 0 Sony Tablet S 0 ) you can still use it for taking part in media etc. Over at the right is where the diminutive power button lives, situated just above where the SIM can fit in for 3G-equipped versions.

Aside from a couple of tiny (ineffective) speakers and a 1.3 megapixel webcam pointing back at you, stuck within the bezel above the LCD, that’s all there’s to set this apart. The back is a smoothly curved slice of matte metal that feels rather like the 1 Motorola Xoom 1 to touch and, surprisingly, the Grid10 is a piece thicker. It’s .55-inches (14mm) at its thickest, on the middle, but that tapers off nicely at the top and the base leading to a tool that feels thinner than it’s.

That taper means there is no room for ports or toggles at the top or the underside, and maybe that’s why the designers at Fusion Garage opted to go away out a volume rocker. Tweaking the output levels here requires you do it through software, which usually means exiting out of whatever app you’re using at this time. That, it ought to be said, is very below optimal.

Similarly, the tablet makes do and not using a rear-facing camera. That’s less of a hassle, since we’re still not into our capturing holiday snaps on a ten-inch camera. Thankfully there’s a minimum of that front-facing sensor, situated above the ten.1-inch, 1,366 x 768 display, which we’ll discuss in only a moment.

The tablet weighs 1.49 pounds (680 grams), that’s about 10 percent greater than the 2 iPad 2 2 and somewhat lighter than the Xoom. It feels reasonably light inside the hand, nevertheless it certainly doesn’t feel particularly comfortable. Each corner of the item is square and so rather sharp, making it rather palm-unfriendly if you would like to carry it at one among its four diagonal extents.

Hold it within the portrait orientation, together with your hand within the middle, and that curving back becomes just a little an argument to boot. Yes, the tablet does fit nicely like this, but unless you may have freakishly long fingers you may be gripping something that’s tapering clear of your hand. That, combined with the graceful, matte backing, creates a tool that constantly appears like it desires to leap to the ground — and its doom.

With the Tablet S, Sony chose a fascinating shape to make the item more hand-friendly. There you wrap your fingers round the fat end and, way to an array of tiny marks that supply grip, you’re able to comfortably and securely hold the article in a single hand. Here, either side are effectively the thin end, and there is nothing on there to assist your hold. We never did send the object flying while holding it one-handed, but neither did we exactly walk with confidence.

Display

The Grid10 has the best resolution display of any 10-inch consumer tablet, 1,366 x 768, and sadly we’d trade that during for something with lower pixel density but better performance. The LCD here isn’t exactly bad, offering a fairly good image, however it definitely suffers from off-axis viewing angles.

Stay head-on and you will get yourself a respectable picture, but twist the article off on one side or another and the contrast quickly drops — especially in case you move to the suitable. This may definitely be a difficulty so one can share a film with a pal, or prop the article on a tray in coach class. Unless you locate the way to angle it most suitable your viewing experience goes to be unfortunately compromised.

So contrast isn’t its strong suit. Resolution, for sure, is, and also you are indeed ready to utilize those extra pixels to display more stuff in any given webpage. In comparison to other 10-inchers you will see more of a post on our site, one other paragraph or two in Wikipedia and by and large spend a chunk more time reading and a bit of less time scrolling. But, this makes buttons and text-entry fields smaller too, so be prepared to perform a little more pinch-zooming.

Performance and battery life

The Grid10 boots up in a good 35 seconds, but things go rather sadly downhill from there. It’s running a Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz processor, which should give it an inexpensive amount of oomph, nevertheless it never feels snappy or responsive. Perhaps it is the 512MB of memory, half that of most 10-inch Honeycomb tablets, that’s causing the hiccups. Regardless of the reason, things just aren’t as quick as they need to be.

Using gestures to raise dialogs is painfully slow, and it doesn’t help that those gestures listed below are ignored way more often than they must be, often leaving our swipes unheeded and us feeling unfulfilled. When the system does react things happen with this sort of delay that you are left asking of yourself “Did the object get that, or should I swipe again?”

Given the character of the operating system here we didn’t dare run any of our usual go-to Android benchmarks, as there is a fair chance they’d not be running optimally. That said we did run the internet-based SunSpider 9.1 JavaScript benchmark, and it went through in a poor 4,000ms. That’s nearly twice so long as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Sony Tablet S took to blitz the identical test, and remember: those two are using an analogous Tegra 2 chip.

As though that weren’t bad enough, the battery life this is genuinely atrocious. Fusion Garage promises seven hours of longevity on a charge, but we didn’t come near that. Just idly surfing around and consuming the entire best / worst that the net has to provide will send the battery reserve plummeting, just like the fuel gauge on a supercar. Start watching a video and things get even worse.

On our standard battery rundown test, a looping video with a set screen brightness and WiFi on but GPS and Bluetooth off, we scored an insignificant four hours and 24 minutes. That’s an hour and a half worse than the unique 3 Galaxy Tab 3 , and an entire two hours wanting the mark set by the 4 Toshiba Thrive 4 . This makes it far and away the least longevous 10-incher we’ve yet tested, and that is despite what has to be an incredibly healthy (non-removable) 5,800mAh battery.

Software

GridOS

The most selling point of the Grid10 is the operating system that powers it: GridOS. It’s said to be built atop the Android kernel (Froyo, version 2.2 if you are wondering) but everything from there as much as the pixels you spot is asserted to be custom. Without access to the source code we won’t inform you indisputably just where the Google ends and the Fusion Garage begins, but it surely is definitely odd that the Grid10 uses the identical default notification sound as Honeycomb.

This foundation allows the tablet to execute phone-friendly Android apps natively but freed Fusion Garage as much as do its own thing at the UI. After we asked Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan why they did not simply build a skin atop Honeycomb, he said there isn’t any point — in the event that they couldn’t do something truly different they would not bother.

And it’s certainly different. The OS is made of a grid, and that grid contains icons that may be optionally grouped into clusters. It is not fundamentally different than the wall of apps we’re used to at the iPad or Android tablets, each icon tucked neatly right into a cubby-hole, but we’d say that we do find this method more enjoyable to exploit — although it makes no room for widgets or other controls.

RTS players would certainly enjoy building an exact map that has games and media apps safely fortified from boring system and productivity stuff, nonetheless it could be a little hard to recollect where you’ve left things.

In place of rigid pages that you could sweep left and right, here you will have an entire 2-D map which you scroll through, vertically or horizontally, even counting on a mini-map at the upper-right to leap from one cluster’s encampment to a different. It sounds just like a technique videogame because that is what it appears like. RTS players will certainly enjoy building an exact map that has games and media apps safely fortified from boring system and productivity stuff, but it surely is usually a little hard to recollect where you’ve left things. People with questionable senses of direction, or anybody who had a difficult time maintaining a tally of their peons in Warcraft II, may find themselves losing their icons now and again.

When you really have a troublesome time finding that game you only downloaded you should use the operating system’s Global Search. Tap the little globe on the top after which just type to get a catalogue of factors that match. Top of the list could be apps, however the system also searches through emails, calendars, contacts and, yes, the web. (Via Bing, we would add.)

Task-switching is achieved through something called the heart beat. Two fingers swiping inward from the left bezel brings it out of hiding, but occasionally you will see a touch of it, glowing from the left-most extent of the screen and letting you recognize that a download has completed or even something else has happened you should take a look at.

Bring it to the fore and you may see a row of ugly, badly compressed icons along the pinnacle that represent the currently running applications. Tap any of those and you may jump back to that app. Below that could be a grid of notifications, which could inform you that you’ve got a brand new email, that somebody said your name on Twitter or which you got tagged on a photograph on Facebook.

There are other gestures, too. Two fingers swept up from the base acts like hitting the menu button (you too can swipe one finger up from a bottom corner), two fingers from the proper is back and two fingers from the head takes you home. In other words: things pretty neatly correspond to the buttons found on Honeycomb, but here replaced by some clumsy gestures.

Now, in case you read our 5 PlayBook 5 or 6 TouchPad 6 reviews that we really really like well-implemented gestures, but here they seem to be a little bit of a trouble. For some thing, it kind of feels the tablet only reacts to them about 1/2 the time — you may be repeating yourself more often than you want. But, more annoyingly, just about all of the gestures require two fingers.

Now, in case you read our PlayBook or TouchPad reviews you understand that we really really like well-implemented gestures, but here they are a little bit of a trouble.

You would not think this will be that much different than swiping with one finger from the bezel (as at the PlayBook), however it actually feels rather a lot more unweildy. Swiping from off the screen to on must be enough of a trademark to the tablet that you are issuing a command while not having to throw one other finger into the mixture.

Still, despite all this, the system picks up your gestures as on-screen drags of the finger. For instance: in case you are on the main grid of icons and also you swipe from the left to increase the heart beat that grid of icons will actually scroll before the pulse pops up — it’s recognizing your motion as a gesture and a drag of the finger. It can be one or the opposite.

Keyboard

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The virtual keyboard hiding in GridOS is wide and fairly well laid out, with each pressed key doping up and above your finger to inform you what you’ve hit. It also attempts to foretell what word you’re typing, including some simple corrections if you’ve mistyped. Mostly, though, you need to achieve up and faucet from the list of suggestions if you need it to head from “wont” to the more common “won’t.” It’s helpful, but we do wish the list of suggestions was a touch larger.

Annoyingly, there is not any hide button at the keyboard, and we regularly found it doping up and covering text entry fields or other areas of the screen we wanted to determine. This was a selected problem when engaged on a Google Doc inside the browser, because tapping elsewhere at the windows doesn’t get you clear of a text field and, once the document was long enough, it spilled down below the keyboard.

Only for kicks, we tried replacing the stock keyboard with the 7 Swiftkey X 7 and were disappointed to locate the article only works with the telephone version, not the stickier Honeycomb one (here’s Android 2.2 at its core, remember). Suffice it to claim the only intended for littler screens didn’t fare well when blown up here.

Browser

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The GridOS web browser has some neat tricks up its sleeve. It does, obviously, display websites and, as you’d expect, allows multiple tabs. But, tabs here (as much as eight) are selected through a fun little rotary dial within the lower-left. Open up a number and you may watch them flip around as you twist the virtual knob, an interaction that’s visual and rewarding but occasionally so sluggish you’ll wish for something rather less flashy.

The foremost interesting feature this is the choice wheel that pops up after you’ve highlighted text. a protracted press of the finger brings up a few carats that you could use to bracket some words. Once selected a wedge interface is displayed that allows copying or opening a brand new browser window to 3 predefined targets, like searching directly on Wikipedia or hitting up Amazon for a bit of shopping.

What’s interesting is this new window splits the pane into two, so that you have separate browser windows visible simultaneously. It is a neat trick, but it’s limiting in that you just shouldn’t have full control over the hot window that opens up. Sure, you are able to tap around and follow links from there, but you cannot enter your personal address at the left and really be surfing two pages right now.

Messages

Messages is the e-mail client that comes as portion of GridOS, but it’s far more than that. It also aggregates your Facebook and Twitter lists and allows you to go between them in no time. Or, we must always say, very sluggishly. It’s incredibly slow, but when you’ve got patience it is a simple but usable interface with a listing of messages in the course of the screen. Tap someone to determine the message contents and consider attachments, respond to an email, etc.

Grid Maps

There’s, alas, no Google Maps available here, so you will have to get by with Fusion Garage’s replacement. Called Grid Maps it is a passable system, providing a handy guide a rough lock in your location and a map view, a satellite view, or a hybrid combination of both. You’ll pinch-zoom or even lower your perspective in the event you love to get a bit in the direction of things.

Search results are generally returned quickly and, from the list of results, you may get additional information at the POI and sometimes get an instantaneous link to Yelp reviews. It’s also possible to get directions here, but we found inconsistent results with the performance. Usually we were on our way in only a second or two, but occasionally the app appeared to get stuck, sitting there and pondering for well over a minute before we got sick of waiting and just went out on our own.

Commonly Grid Maps is a good online mapping service, however it certainly pales compared to Google’s offering (no street-level views, no store hours, no integrated reviews, etc.).

Amazon Appstore

There is not lots to assert concerning the 8 Amazon Appstore 8 except that it is your primary venue for downloading apps onto the tablet. (That said, side-loading is definitely possible.) Amazon’s built this thing up in order that it has an honest selection, but it’s hardly as comprehensive because the proper Android Market, that you cannot use. As an instance, whilst you certainly have your collection of Angry Birds titles in either store, not one of the popular Story games from Kairosoft can be found here, nor are the premium navigation suites (CoPilot, TeleNav, etc.).

And, to be clear, you haven’t any access to any of the key Google apps that have a tendency to make Android so good. You understand, Gmail, Google Maps, Calendar…

Camera

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Again, there’s only front-facing webcam to fret about here. It’s 1.3 megapixels and takes pictures of a decidedly mediocre quality, but ought to be adequate for video chat. This is, obviously, assuming you’ll find a video chat application — neither Skype or Qik is offered via Amazon.

Wrap-up

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If you are going to head from your technique to bypass a longtime option like Honeycomb and do your individual thing, your personal 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 tool that simply fails to conquer the suitable of the Android tablets — never mind anything.

It is, much better than the departed JooJoo, but still a major disappointment for us. We adore an honest second-coming story up to the subsequent guy and were genuinely hopeful that the rough, early versions of GridOS we saw could be polished into something new and exciting, but what we now have continues to be crude and clunky. We’re always longing for the longer term, but we fear no amount of polish can make this thing shine.

So this, then, is a second-coming that wouldn’t have been, leaving us shaking our heads in dismay another time, wondering whether anybody else can step in and crack the kings on the top.

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This post is tagged: flat cardboard, good first impression, new challenger, packing materials, product launch, second chance, second chances