Hands On with Viewsonic Viewtab 7 & Viewtab 100

Viewsonic is jumping into the Android tablet game with the Viewpad 7 and the Viewpad 100. Both are fairly straightforward Android tablets with little to speak of in terms of customization.

The Viewpad 7 offers a much better overall Android experience -- it's running Froyo with a properly sized keyboard with what would seem like a pokey 600MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512 megs of RAM. As always with Android, though, the real test is the implementation and in this case we found the Viewpad 7 to hold its own in terms of speed and responsiveness. Nothing to write home about, but nothing to cry about either. Unfortunately, the display here is a paltry 800x480 pixels, so perhaps it's no wonder that it's responding to taps as we'd like.

The Viewpad 100 is both more exciting and less. More exciting because it's a 10-inch tablet with 1024x600 resolution that's able to boot into a full version of Windows 7 if you'd like. Less so because it's running on Android 1.6 because later versions of Android aren't yet playing nice with the Viewpad 100's Atom processor. In general, this version didn't feel fully baked - Viewsonic has yet to build the interface for dual-booting the device, but on the bright side the sucker did boot faster than most Android smartphones we've laid eyes on.

Both Viewpads should hit Europe in October, no word yet when they're coming stateside. Images and video after the break!

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]