Yesterday, Creative announced the launch of two tablet PCs among a lineup of products that aimed to put them back in the portable media game. In general terms, the Android based tablets didn’t offer anything too spectacular, but where they really excel is in the wireless audio department with the latest technology ensuring that ripped music sounds as good as it did on the original media and full surround sound offered from just two speakers.
Today is the turn of Viewsonic to announce their own lineup of proposed tablet PCs and the PC monitor manufacturer but, in all honesty, they are pretty limited in their offering without appearing to be especially inexpensive either.
The first model is the ViewPad 10. The one thing this has going for it is the large 10.1 inch screen with fairly standard 1024 x 600 pixel resolution. Instead of ARM processors which are considered to give greater processing power for less effort, it is carrying a 1.66GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage.
This means that it will run Android, although for some reason it’s only packing the virtually defunct Android 1.6, but it can also offer Windows 7 though we doubt it will offer much capability to do anything especially complex with meagre processing power and storage. The ViewPad 10 is reported to cost $629 so it certainly doesn’t fall in the category of budget or inexpensive.
The other model makes arguably even less sense.
The ViewPad 7 has a 7 inch screen but only offers 800 x 480 resolution which is roughly equivalent to your standard smartphone. Considering Viewsonic is best known for its manufacture of PC monitors it’s a surprise they didn’t offer something better. It will at least sport Android 2.2 and have a front and rear facing camera making it essentially a very large and cumbersome smartphone.