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.