There has been some hype built up recently surrounding a new mysterious tablet being released by a fake company called TabCo. TabCo hosted a video press conference today, but pretended that it was a live video feed in front of an audience. Tabco quickly pulled back the curtain to reveal the truth, that they were really Fusion Garage, makers of the Joo Joo tablet.
Fusion Garage decided to create the fake company and viral videos to build up hype around the product itself, and not have people’s view of the company cloud their vision. It’s a bad sign when a company’s image is so bad that it has to hide who it really is when talking about its product.
So on with the actual devices. First came the Grid 10, which is a 10-inch tablet that is based on Android but runs a custom version. Oddly it’s called Grid, and it is called that due to its grid user interface. View the embedded video below to see how the UI works, it looks pretty neat from what little we have seen. So Grid is based on the Android kernel, but isn’t running a version of Android; this means that the Grid 10 is able to run Android apps, but is not a Honeycomb tablet. If you want you can pre-order your tablet today, and it will be available next month in stores.
During the taped press conference, Fusion Garage also announced it is making a new phone, the Fusion 4. The phone shares the same OS as the tablet, has a 4-inch screen, and is packing a dual core processor. The phone works closely with your tablet so that when consuming media content on one device you can continue on the other device uninterrupted. There is no exact release date for the Grid 4, but we are told it will be available in the forth quarter of this year.
It is too soon to see if Fusion Garage’s decision to hide its identity leading up to today’s announcement was a smart move or not. There is a very good possibility that no one would even be talking about the Grid 10 if Fusion Garage hosted the press event under its actual name. View the video below to see exactly what Fusion Garage is offering. The Grid OS looks pretty neat, and hopefully we will get a chance to get our hands on a tablet soon.