The Fusion Garage Grid10 had a story before it was even a real product: thoroughly embarrassed by the spectacular failure of last year’s JooJoo tablet, Fusion Garage conducted an over-the-top viral marketing campaign for a fake company called TabCo before CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan delivered a pre-taped keynote address revealing his new tablet. Unlike the Intel- and Linux-powered JooJoo, the Grid10 is a much more familiar combination of Android EM73Sand a dual-core Tegra 2 processor, but you won’t mistake this for any other Honeycomb tablet — Fusion Garage has taken the core of Android Flytouch 3 Superpad and built an entirely separate gesture-based operating system called GridOS on top. You won’t find any Google apps here; everything from the mapping app to the mail client is a Fusion Garage original, and apps are provided by the Amazon Appstore. It’s an unusual riff on what’s become the usual tablet strategy, and it’s all priced at just $299 — but is it actually worth it? Read on for the full review.
