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ViewSonic ViewPad 10 review: ViewSonic ViewPad 10

ViewSonic ViewPad 10

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
  • Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Dan Ackerman
7 min read

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.

5.4

ViewSonic ViewPad 10

The Good

The compact <b>ViewSonic ViewPad 10</b> dual-boots into both Windows 7 and Android, and was recently updated to jump from Android 1.6 to 2.2.

The Bad

The device lacks physical controls for volume or screen orientation, and the Android side is stuck at version 2.2 and doesn't include the Android Market. There are some frustrating interface issues, and we spent too much time troubleshooting network connectivity problems.

The Bottom Line

Mixing a sluggish Windows tablet with an outdated Android one makes the Intel Atom-powered ViewSonic ViewPad 10 less than ideal for either OS.

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.

Price as reviewed $599
Processor 1.66GHz Intel Atom N455
Memory 1GB, 667MHz DDR2
Hard drive 16GB SSD
Chipset Intel NM10
Graphics Intel GMA 3150
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium / Android 2.2
Dimensions (WD) 10.8x6.7 inches
Height 0.6 inch
Screen size (diagonal) 10.1 inches
System weight / Weight with AC adapter 1.9 pounds / 2.5 pounds
Category Netbook/tablet

The ViewSonic ViewPad 10, while not as slick as an iPad or Motorola Xoom, is still an upscale-looking device with an edge-to-edge glass screen on the front and a metal back panel. It's sturdy, and a bit hefty, yet slim enough to fit into even small bags.

That said, the lack of physical controls on the chassis for audio volume or to lock the screen orientation is incredibly frustrating. Even the button-averse iPad includes those.

While the ViewPad 10 is available in both Wi-Fi and 3G versions, we tested the Wi-Fi-only model. One of our major pain points was the machine's Internet connectivity. On both the Android and Windows sides, the Wi-Fi antenna repeatedly turned itself off and required frequent troubleshooting to fix.

The ViewPad 10 has three physical buttons along its right side: power, home, and a curved arrow that acts as a back or Enter button, depending on the context. In the Android mode, pressing the home button sent Web browsers and control panels back a step, while holding it down sent you back to the Android desktop.

While booting, you encounter a choose-the-OS screen that stays open for a few seconds before defaulting to Windows. To switch to the other OS, you'll have to remember to press the middle (home) button, move the highlighted selection down from Windows to Android, then hit the bottom button to enter your selection. To be fair, the included documentation covers this, informing the user, "Short press for down select; long press for up select," but it's about as unintuitive as you can get. Also covered in the included documentation, but similarly unintuitive, is the fact that holding down the bottom of the three physical buttons will turn the Wi-Fi antenna off and on, which solved some, but not all, of our networking problems.

Touch response on the screen is quick and accurate, but simple tasks such as flicking up or down a long Web page don't really work--again a problem with Windows 7 as a touch platform, rather than a particular issue with this hardware. Onscreen typing is similarly a nonpremium experience, and the cramped, built-in Microsoft onscreen keyboard offers itself up when you tap on some text-entry fields but not others.

The 10.1-inch display has a 1,024x600-pixel resolution, lower even than many 10- or 11-inch Netbooks, which ramp up to 1,366x768 pixels. It's a large-enough screen for personal video viewing, although the smudge-friendly surface filled up with fingerprints quickly. Off-axis viewing was surprisingly good, but don't expect too much from the tiny, tinny speakers.

ViewSonic ViewPad 10 Average for category [Netbook]
Video Mini DisplayPort VGA
Audio Stereo speakers, headphone jack, built-in mic Stereo speakers, headphone/microphone jacks
Data 2 USB 2.0, microSD card reader 3 USB 2.0, SD card reader
Expansion None None
Networking 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Optical drive None None

For a tablet, the ViewPad 10 has a decent set of ports and connections, especially compared with something like the iPad. The two USB ports are especially useful for hooking up an external keyboard and mouse. The microSD slot can hold a card up to 32GB in size, which is important as the internal 16GB storage is mostly used up with the Windows install. In fact, many functions, such as installing some apps, actually require an SD card to be installed.

On the Windows 7 side, testing the performance of the system was as easy as testing any Netbook or laptop, especially as it uses the Intel Atom N455 CPU, a familiar face from the Netbook world. The ViewPad 10 ran our benchmark tests about as well as Acer's W500 Windows 7 tablet, which uses AMD's similar C-50 CPU, and was also comparable to a Dell Latitude 2010 Netbook, with an Atom N550 CPU. We've seen some tablets try to get away with using Intel's lower-end Z-series Atom CPUs, such as the Archos 9 PC Tablet, and the ViewPad easily surpasses that level of performance.

That said, an Intel Atom isn't great for everyday use, beyond the most basic Web surfing and e-mail tasks. The Android side felt reasonably fast and responsive, but the Windows 7 side could get sluggish at times. Asus managed to cram a newer Core i5 CPU into its slightly larger Eee Slate Windows tablet, setting a new performance standard for Windows tablets. On the ViewPad 10, however, we were able to play full-screen 720p HD video with no problem, and we even played some Facebook games.

Juice box
ViewSonic ViewPad 10 Average watts per hour
Off (60%) 0.79
Sleep (10%) 0.99
Idle (25%) 6.85
Load (05%) 14.78
Raw kWh number 26.52
Annual power consumption cost $3.01

Annual power consumption cost
ViewSonic ViewPad 10
$3.01 

A tablet is designed to be carried around and used on the go. That's why running only 3 hours and 11 minutes in our video playback battery drain test doesn't exactly fill us with confidence. Casual, nonvideo use should give you a longer runtime, but unlike with a laptop, you can't just close the lid and send the system into sleep or hibernate mode easily; you'll have to set up the system to go to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity in the power options menu, or navigate to the sleep command through the Windows menu via fingertip. Acer's Iconia W500 tablet ran for about an hour longer on the same test, and a basic Netbook can easily run an additional 2 hours or more.

ViewSonic offers a limited one-year warranty on parts and labor, but tech support resources are hard to find on the ViewSonic site. Click on the "online support" button and you're redirected to a page with a blank field in which to type in your context-free question to an automated-response bot. A handful of drivers are available, as is the software required to update the Android OS from version 1.6 to 2.2, although this is a cumbersome procedure, requiring you to download a third-party software package, save an ISO file onto a USB drive, and hook up a USB keyboard in order to install the update. Also, ViewSonic's toll-free support phone number isn't listed on the support section of the site, although we found it under the Contact Us page (it's 800-688-6688).

jAlbum photo conversion test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Multimedia multitasking test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
ViewSonic ViewPad 10
3,075 

Apple iTunes encoding test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
ViewSonic ViewPad 10
826 

Video playback battery drain test (in minutes)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Find out more about how we test laptops.

System configurations:

ViewSonic ViewPad 10
Windows 7 Home Premium/Android 1.6; 1.66GHz Intel Atom N455; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 3150; 16GB SanDisk SSD

Dell Latitude 2120
Windows 7 Home Premium; 1.5GHz Intel Atom N550 Dual-Core; 2,048MB DDR3 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB (Shared) Intel GMA 3150; 250GB Seagate 5,400rpm

Toshiba Libretto W105-L251
Windows 7 Home Premium; 1.2GHz Intel Pentium U5400; 2,048MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 728MB (Shared) Intel GMA HD; 62GB Toshiba SSD

Archos 9 PC Tablet
Windows 7 Starter; 1.1GHz Intel Atom Z515; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 400MHz; 250MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 500; 60GB Toshiba 4,200rpm

Acer Iconia Tab W500
Windows 7 Home Premium; 1GHz AMD C-50 Dual-Core; 2,048MB DDR3 SDRAM 667MHz; 384MB (Dedicated) ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6250; 32GB SanDisk SSD

5.4

ViewSonic ViewPad 10

Score Breakdown

Design 6Features 5Performance 6Battery 5Support 6