Firstly I need to thank fusionGarage for sending me out a Grid10 as a gift for being an original JooJoo customer, the experience wasn’t painless as i never received the original offer email and their initial customer service was reminiscent of their JooJoo days, however after a tweet about their customer service fG’s media team got in contact with me and promptly sorted the issue out. Once my original JooJoo invoice details were confirmed the device was shipped and it arrived within a few days.
I was pleasantly surprised to find i had been shipped the 16Gb Wifi+3G model and not the Wifi-only base model. So props to fusionGarage for this.
There are plenty of other reviews that talk about the history or the hardware specs of the Grid10 so i’m going to just jump in with my experiences in using the device.
First impressions
Getting the device unpacked was simple and the packaging was very apple-esque, once you’ve started it up the first thing you are greeted with is the welcome screen asking you to connect to a WiFi network so you can register the device with fusionGarage before you can use it.
Connecting to the Wifi network took a few goes, with some head scratching, as it didn’t like my network setup, changing to a different wireless network fixed it and the non-obvious “next” button became obvious.
Next the device was required to be registered with fusionGarage, while initially off-putting the process was painless enough not to be a burden, i’ll blog more on the sync services if i get around to using them.
GridOS Grid Launcher
I need to say this on the grid navigation: They got this right!
The navigation experience of the GridOS is really intuitive, unlike some other reviewers, i like having all my applications on the grid surface. Similar to others, I’ve found that the “global” gestures do regularly & frustratingly interact with the active application.
However the Grid10’s Grid navigation gestures would have been better replaced with hardware buttons that most users are accustomed to on other android tablets.
One downside is the amazon app store not being available in Australia yet and I’m getting the impression there are some performance improvements to come as some things feel sluggish for a dual-core system.
More to come later as i explore the device further, get a sim card for 3G use and test out its battery life.
