Manufacturer Fusion Garage has a new operating system called Grid OS. It is based on the Android kernel and will run on two new devices of the company: the Grid 10 tablet and Grid 4 smartphone.
Grid OS is, according to Fusion Garage is no custom version of Android, but it makes partially use of the same parts. So it shares the kernel with the popular operating system from Google, and also is the Dalvik VM that Grid OS must be able to Android applications to run. The manufacturer compares the relationship between Android and Grid OS with that of BSD, and Mac OS X.
The operating system uses, as the name already indicates, a grid layout in which various interface elements can be placed. The first two devices of Grid OS use, the Grid 10 tablet and Grid 4 smartphone. The former is a 10.1″device powered by a Nvidia Tegra 2 soc at 1.2 GHz. The tablet weighs 690g, measure 274,2×173,5×13,9mm and the screen has a resolution of 1366×768 pixels. There is 16GB of storage memory built in and this can be expanded via a micro-sd card.
The Grid 4 smartphone running on the MSM8255 from Qualcomm, a singlecore-soc with a speed of 1GHz. The 4″screen has a resolution of 800×480 pixels and can be up to four fingers register. The phone has 512MB memory, 16GB storage memory and a micro-sd slot. The main camera has a resolution of 5 megapixel and comes accompanied by an led flash. The front-facing camera for video calling has a resolution of 0.3 megapixel. The 137gram weighing device measures 122,4×63,9×9,6mm has a 1300mAh battery, support for bluetooth 2.1 and wifi b/g/n and uses micro-sim format.
Fusion Garage announced the devices and the OS after a few weeks of viral marketing. The company had set up a special website for the fictitious company, TabCo set up, in which the small amounts of information neighbour about to launch products. Fusion Garage introduced at the beginning of 2010 already have a tablet; the JooJoo. This tablet was powered by an Intel Atom cpu and ran on a custom version of Linux.
The wi-fi model of the Grid 10 is 499 dollars while the 3g model and 599 dollars should cost. The tablet is from the 15th of september in America sold; it is not yet known whether and when the tablet in other countries, true. The Grid 4 is at the end of this year launched, and is going to los 399 dollar costs.