Viewsonic ViewPad 10s

“Aside from a lot of fun, testing the ViewPad 10s also bestowed us with a lot of frustration. Manual deleting of apps from the memory via task manager gets annoying after a while. However, this is not only a problem of the Viewsonic, but of many other Android pads as well. 512 MBs of RAM is quickly filled. It's comparable with, for example, the latest Windows PC that has to work with a 512 MB RAM in Windows. The Home key's positioning and the lateral ports' magnetic cover are also unfavorable.The capacitive touchscreen responds extremely fast to finger inputs – sometimes even too fast. The image reproduction as well as the viewing angles is acceptable. The display is reflective and occasionally shows more from the surroundings than the display's actual content.The ViewPad 10s from Viewsonic is an inexpensive entry model at a street price of 299 euros. The 10.1 inch display diagonal is an eye-catcher everywhere – in the train, in the beer garden and even among colleagues. It doesn't always have to be Apple.”

“The end result is a tablet that only really feels comfortable browsing the web and watching video, and then accepting that crashes are more frequent than they should be in these areas and the screen could be better. For some that might be acceptable, but despite being asked to pay a little more than you might elsewhere, there is seemingly little to get excited about. The ViewSonic ViewPad 10s, overall, isn’t particularly stable as a software build and the feel of the tablet in the hand isn’t that good either, making it difficult to recommend.”

“The ViewSonic ViewPad 10s doesn't come across as a tablet catastrophe, but decent internal specs simply can't match up to an experience with cut corners and a lack of optimised software.It doesn't stand up as a budget machine against the likes of the Advent Vega just below it in price or original iPad just above it (while it lasts), and in terms of overall experience it's just not even fit to gaze upon the iPad 2 or Motorola Xoom”

“ViewSonic has worked hard to keep the cost of the ViewPad 10s down, by not licensing any of Google's good apps and equipping it with a cut-rate screen. But the company's blown the savings on a plethora of ports that aren't as important as simple, usable software. The 10s is much cheaper than the big-name Android competition -- the Motorola Xoom, for example, costs £500 -- but it shows. We'd steer clear if we were you.”