Windows tablets have finally started to show a little bit of life, with the recent Asus Eee Slate EP121 and even the Acer Iconia Tab W500 offering a vision for the future of tablet-PC hybrids. Standalone Windows slate-style tablets, however, have always fared less well (and we've been reviewing them for years before the iPad). The $599 ViewSonic ViewPad 10 attempts to position itself as a more useful tablet by including both Windows 7 and Android--a good idea, on paper at least.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
While the ViewPad 10 hardware has been out since late 2010, our interest was piqued by the recent upgrade from Android 1.6 to Android 2.2. It's still not the latest Honeycomb 3.0 version, which is a much better fit for tablets, but it at least makes the ViewPad a bit more usable (although Android fans may also be put off by the preinstalled third-party app store in place of the more popular Android Market).
Related links
• Acer Iconia Tab W500P review
• Asus Eee Slate EP121 review
• Archos 9 PC tablet review
The Windows side, which we were primarily concerned with (our benchmark tests below reflect Windows scores), falls victim to the same fate as other Intel Atom-powered tablets: sluggish performance. On top of that, the Windows interface is simply not built for touch-screen devices, and the default Win 7 onscreen keyboard is hard to use on this elongated 10-inch 1,024x600-pixel screen. These complaints are true of any similar Windows tablet and aren't specific to ViewSonic. There are, however, several problems specific to the ViewPad, such as the lack of a physical volume control, frequent Wi-Fi issues, unintuitive buttons, and poor battery life.
For a Netbook-like price, perhaps under $300, this dual-booting tablet could find an audience with those who need to be able to switch between Android and Windows on the fly, but with 16GB of SSD space (and only a couple of gigabytes are actually free to use after the twin OS installations) for the same $599 as a 32GB iPad, it's hard to call this a satisfying consumer experience.