ViewSonic ViewPad 7e Review

Introduction:

Known for being a prominent monitor manufacturer, we’ve already seen ViewSonic dabbling in the tablet market for the last year now with devices like the Android powered ViewPad 7 and ViewPad 10. Coming around for a second at bat with a 7” offering, they’re hoping to reel in some people with their affordably priced ViewSonic ViewPad 7e model.

Design:

Let’s be honest here, our first impression about the ViewSonic ViewPad 7e is that it looks like some sort of digital picture frame with its very cheap plastic casing – even worse, it’s very bland looking and extremely heavy. Generally, 7-inch tablets are relatively easy to hold with one hand, but with this one, its wide frame and heavy weight makes it difficult to hold with one hand.



Bringing us back to memories of long ago, the ViewPad 7e features a 7” 800x600 px. resistive touchscreen – yes folks, you heard that right, it utilizes a RESISTIVE touchscreen! As much as we’re appalled by it, we’re further annoyed by the fact that its quality is abysmally poor – to the point unusable at times. Not only is it immensely pixilated, but its very weak brightness output and terrible viewing angles washes out the display. For comparison, both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet feature 1024x600 pixels resolution capacitive screens with much better image qualtiy.


For the price, we like that it offers a front-facing 0.3-megapixel camera, microSD card slot, 3-megapixel rear camera, miniUSB port, microphone, and microHDMI port. Aside from using the proprietary charging port to juice it up, you can actually do the same with its miniUSB port too.

Interface and Functionality:

Superficially, the ViewPad 7e features a stock Android 2.3 Gingerbread experience, but seeing that it’s not a “with Google” device, it lacks such useful things like the Android Market, Gmail, and YouTube. The Amazon App Store is there to provide us some support with third party applications. Alternatively, its ViewScene 3D UI dishes up a lot of eye-candy with its 3D carousel effect, but besides the glitzier presentation, there’s nothing advantageous about it. Despite the loss of the Android Market.


Even though its single-core 1GHz ARM A8 processor with 512MB of RAM doesn’t seem impressive on paper by today’s standards, it’s decent enough to provide ample processing power when it’s needed – though, it exhibits some choppiness every now and then.

Typing on its resistive screen is a nightmare on its own! Besides experiencing some inaccuracy issues with the stock Android keyboard, it can be rather sluggish with its response. Still, the Swype keyboard proves to be a little bit more tolerable.



Camera:

As much as we’re pleased with ViewSonic for throwing a pair of cameras onto this thing, the results are nowhere close to acceptable. Specifically, still shots simply look as though someone painted them with a thick brush, as they boast muddy details and a mostly out-of-focus appearance. Better than nothing?

Things don’t get any better with its maximum 1024 x 768 video capture, well, that’s because it quality is severely softened by its muddy appearance and sensitive exposure – albeit, it moves smoothly at 29 frames per second and captures clear audio.

ViewSonic ViewPad 7e Sample Video:



Multimedia:

With the stock Gingerbread music player, it lacks any visual flare, but is more than functional in getting us rocking to our tunes. However, its speaker quality is profoundly shrill to the tone, which ends up being more irritating to the ear than anything else.


Interestingly, the ViewPad 7e is able to play our test video encoded in MPEG-4 1920 x 1080 resolution – and with no problems at all! Nonetheless, our eyes can’t get over its dull looking display – thus, making the experience less than pleasing.


Thankfully, the microHDMI port on the tablet provides us the usefulness of having a mirrored experience, which comes in handy for quickly sharing multimedia content with our TV.

Internet and Connectivity:

Whereas most Honeycomb tablets offer a decent web browsing experience, the ViewPad 7e requires a lot of patience since it’s evidently tedious with its operation. Actually, the entire thing suffers from plenty of slowdown and lag! Meanwhile, things don’t get any better when Flash content is present.


At its price point, it’s hardly expected for a tablet of this caliber to offer anything beyond Wi-Fi connectivity as its main source of data connection – and rightfully so, we’re dead on the mark.

Performance:

Regretfully, battery life is a total wash out with the ViewPad 7e seeing that we’re able to get a little bit over 8 hours of normal usage out of a single charge.

Conclusion:

Resisting its $200 price point from getting the best of us, there’s no kidding that it’s undeniably affordable on any budget. However, even though it packs the usefulness of such things like a microHDMI port, microSD card slot, and cameras, it is not a polished product that prides quality above all things. Actually, it is way worse than the Amazon Kindle Fire which comes at the same price or the Nook Color, which is priced at $250. Yes, these may lack some features the ViewPad 7e has, but are way better when it comes to real life usage.

Software version of the reviewed unit:
Android Version: 2.3.1
Kernel Version: 2.6.35.7-svn

ViewSonic ViewPad 7e Video Review: