Singapore – Fusion
Garage, which pulled its
from the market last year, has postponed availability of its
by two weeks to Oct. 1 and reduced its price to $299 from an initial
$499 for the Wi-Fi-equipped model.
The Grid 10, which
features an Android-based but proprietary Grid OS, has been re-priced because
the company was able to “negotiate better supply chain pricing from its
manufacturing partner,” a spokesperson said. Fusion Garage said it had hoped to
announce the $299 Grid10 pricing when the product was unveiled on Aug. 15.
Availability has
been postponed from Sept. 15 to Oct. 1, the company said, because of new
criteria in the Adobe Flash Player 10.3 approval process, called DCTS testing.
“Grid10 had to be resubmitted for testing to meet new Adobe requirements,” the
company said, “our original slot in the DCTS approval queue was eliminated, and
we had to resubmit and obtain a new testing schedule.”
The compay also reduced the price of the Wi-Fi+3G version of the tablet to $399 from $599. It’s equipped with with quadband GSM/HSPA 3G technology.
The tablet’s Grid
OS is built on the Android OS kernel but is designed to differentiate itself
from what the company called the “sameness” of Android tablets and phones. On
its 10.1-inch screen, the user interface is completely different from its
full-Android counterparts, the company said. The OS organizes apps and content
on an “endless grid,” is free of hard buttons, and uses swipes and a virtual
scroll wheel to navigate through functions. It will download standard Android
apps from Amazon’s app store and, from Fusion Garage’s web store, apps written
with Fusion Garage’s application programming interface (API).
The Grid 10 has
been available for preordering at Amazon.com and Fusion Garage’s website. Consumers who
preordered will be compensated for the price adjustment, the company said.
