ViewSonic G70, E70 and E100 Android tablets Hands-on Review

Let's start with the entry level ViewPad E70 and slowly build up the excitement, shall we?  Its main virtue is the price - about $170 for an Android ICS slate does not sound bad at all, and it ships in April. The buck stops here though, since the 7" display on the E70 has 800x480 pixels, making everything look rather grainy, not to mention that the slate feels rather heavy and unwieldy to hold.

The E70 is powered by a 1GHz Cortex-A9 processor and has 512MB of RAM, but the interface lags a lot while navigating it, hopefully this will be polished in the final software version. The E70 is not a "with Google" device, meaning no Android Market and other Google services will be present, not to mention it is Wi-Fi only, without even Bluetooth or GPS radios.

The ViewPad G70 steps it up quite a bit with a 3G option, 1024x600 resolution of the 7" screen, 2MP rear camera and VGA front-facer, full connectivity suite and above all - Android Market. The tablet is powered by 1GHz Cortex-A9 as well and runs Ice Cream Sandwich, like the E70, plus they share the same 3300mAh capacity battery. 

It handles the interface navigation a bit better than the E70, but still leaves a lot to be desired for the final unit. The G70 will ring in at almost twice the E70 price, thanks to the more humanly specs, and it is to be available around June.

The third Android tablet we handled is more interesting - the ViewPad E100 has a 9.7" IPS display with 1024x768 pixels, 1.2GHz processor and comes with Android Ice Cream Sandwich preloaded. It was the snappiest of the bunch and the design exudes way more premium feeling. 

The slate comes at 9.1mm thin, and weighs only 620g - only a hair less compact than an iPad 2, for instance, but you also get microHDMI port and microSD slot to expand the built-in storage. The ViewPad E100 will have a version with a SIM card slot as well, and it won't break the bank for these specs when it hits Europe before June starting at sub-$400 for the Wi-Fi-only version.