Introducing Fusion Garage
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 6:47AM | Print Article At the beginning of the tablet war there were only a few players on the market. One of these players was a tablet called the JooJoo. Unfortunately due to a number of company blunders and the runaway success of the iPad, the JooJoo was essentially dead on arrival. Since then the product has entered obscurity and can probably be found at the bottom of bargain buckets across the US. However, like all good stories this was not end of the ill fated JooJoo.
Like the phoenix, the JooJoo has risen from the ashes as a new product (from a newly named company). The company is now Fusion Garage and on Monday the company head Chandra Rathakrishnan took to the stage to unveil two new products, known as the Grid 10 and Grid 4. Both products will run an Android based operating system known as the Grid Operating System (I'm sensing a theme here) and will have access to the Grid Shop (App Store) as well as being able to run native Android applications.
As the name suggests, the Grid 10 is a 10-inch tablet powered by the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset and comes with a market leading 1366x768 resolution screen. The image below shows a preview of the new tablet:
The tablet is set to cost $499 for the WiFi-only version and $599 for a WiFi / 3G model. It's up for pre-order now via Amazon and will begin shipping in the US on 15th September.
The Grid 4 is the company's first attempt at a smartphone. It has a 4-inch 800x480 resolution screen and is powered by a Qualcomm dual-core processor. The phone will run $399 unlocked and will hopefully begin shipping in the US in Q4, with carriers being announced closer to the launch.
Although both of these products look interesting, I would personally hold off on any pre-order at this time. As we have seen over the past few weeks the mobile market is changing on a daily basis and if superpower's such as Motorola and HP are struggling, then it makes you wonder what an unknown company such as Fusion Garage can do differently. I'll have my fingers crossed as more competition can only be a positive for the consumer.