Fusion Garage has been working quietly on its new Grid 10 tablet and Grid 4 smartphone ever since the atrocious JooJoo Tablet fell flat on its face last year. They’re slick gadgets and a huge improvement over the JooJoo, but they still need a bit of work.

Fusion Garage announced its Grid 10 tablet and Grid 4 smartphone on Monday, and gave us a chance to check out some demo versions firsthand. As demo versions, they do have some kinks to iron out before they hit store shelves.

The Hardware: Polished and sleek

Both the Grid 10 and Grid 4 have a semi-cylindrical form factor, with rounded backs that taper to a thin edge. They displays are crisp, clean and buttonless, with nary a button on the face. Each has a small power button on the side, but they’re otherwise controlled through the touch-screen interface.

The Grid 10 features a widescreen display of — you guessed it — 10 inches, with 1366 x 768 resolution. It weighs 680 grams, or about 1.5 pounds. The Grid 4 has an 800 x 480 display and fits comfortably in your hand. Its weight is on par with other smartphones of its size.

The User Interface: Innovative and, well, grid-like

GridOS is built atop the Android operating system, so it can run Android apps. Yet it looks nothing like any Android device we’ve seen. In GridOS, the single home screen expands as far as you need it to. Flick off to the right, left, top or bottom and you’ll find space to place (or find) your apps. There are no pages or multiple screens to deal with; the homescreen simply expands as needed. And, of course, it’s a grid.

The grid-based homescreen on the Grid 10, with two groupings of apps visible, and the navigation map in the upper right corner.

You can arrange the square app icons in groups or clusters, then label the group. You could make a social group with Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, for example, another for news, another for games and so on.

Go crazy and the screen can end up looking like a game of Tetris. You can arrange the clusters wherever you like — lines, squares, Tetris-like shapes. With such a large home screen, it could be possible to get lost amongst your apps and groups, but a map in the upper right-hand corner keeps you in check. You can tap the map to jump quickly to a specific group, or slide around your home screen, or simply flick your way across the screen manually.

Subtle Tron-like grid animations add polish to the user interface. There’s an animation of blocks stacking or unstacking at the bottom of the screen appears when you load the web browser, for example, making it look like a web page is being built from the bottom of the screen up. It’s a nice touch, and gives a bit of life to the Android interface that we haven’t seen before.

Fusion Garage re-thought much of the tablet experience, all the way down to the controls for the music and video players. Instead of the traditional horizontal status bar showing where you are in a video (think YouTube), it’s a circle, with the play/pause button in the center. The volume slider also is curved, to the right of the circular video control. It looks nice, but it takes up a little more real estate than the conventional layout. When you’re playing music, the audio controls can be reached via a small icon in the upper right hand corner of the device.

A similar circular navigation area is used in the lower left-hand corner of the device when multiple tabs are open in the browser. Pretty cool, but again, it eats up space on the screen.

The Experience: Good, Yet Unpolished

Overall, I enjoyed checking out the Grid 10 and Grid 4, but there were definitely some user experience-related issues that needed ironing out.

Since there are no buttons on the screen, there are a few gestures you have to regularly use: a two finger swipe from right to left to go back and a two finger swipe downward to go Home. On the Grid 4’s smaller screen, they’re single finger swipes.

This worked pretty well but was a bit slow. It look at least a second to go from, say, the music player app back to the home screen. If you get impatient and just keep swiping (er, like I did), it won’t respond at all. The touch controls aren’t as responsive as I would have liked.

The browser also crashed or force-closed a few times. Other features weren’t quite ready for prime time, including the camera app and a number of Android apps that appeared on the homescreen but simply opened as a web page in the browser. (Again, I was using a demo unit, not the complete, finished product).

However, the GridOS devices have some cool features, like syncing between devices — you can start watching a movie on one device, pause it, then pick up where you left off on another. And when you highlight a word, the “Buzz Recommendations” feature kicks in, providing you with different options. Say you highlight “Inception.” GridOS will let you see the definition, or give you the option of downloading or playing the movie.

All in all, Fusion Garage’s Grid tablet and smartphone are well thought-out. The interface is intuitive and creative, deviating usefully from what you expect of iOS and Android devices without being different for difference’s sake. If Fusion Garage can iron out the bugs, they’ll be nifty devices.

The Grid 10 tablet will be available September 15; the Grid 4, will be available later this year.