iiView vPad Tablet Revealed

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Even before the oversized iPod Touch iPad was announced we saw tons of slate-style tablets emerge from companies hoping to take a piece of Apple’s pie. The folks at iiView have introduced a new tablet, dubbed the vPad which will come with a 10-inch screen.

In addition to the screen, the vPad will come with an Intel Atom N270 processor and 1GB of RAM, along with a 160GB hard drive. It’ll be running the cheap Starter edition of Windows 7, which is crippled but it runs well on Atom processors and probably saved $75 off the cost of the tablet.

iiView’s choice of a N270 has been getting a lot of flack from the tech coverage, with a lot of reporters saying that watching YouTube and Hulu is “impossible on a N270,” and that they should of added “a N450 Atom.” Both of these are fallacies.

It’s true that the Atom N270 lack an HD accelerator, but YouTube and 95% of Flash video runs fine with an Atom N270. Some Flash video, including Hulu, will run poorly. I speak from personal experience on the matter.

Secondly, the N450 Atom, which is based on Intel’s Pine Trail architecture, offers an improvement in only one area over the earlier Atom processors, and that’s its improved power consumption. We covered this in our original article covering the launch of the Pine Trail line.

At any rate, the vPad won’t be a extreme video machine like the iPad seems like it will be, but it’s pretty much a netbook in a tablet form, which means its fine for netbook uses, like word processing and net surfing. The default configuration will cost $500 (a bit pricey) while a 3G-enabled version will cost $700.