New iPad Competitor Emerges; Neofonie Calls it the WePad

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A new day in the upcoming tablet wars has come and we have yet another iPad competitor out there. This time it’s called the WePad (maybe the plural of iPad?) and it’s coming all the way from a little German company called Neofonie.

The device clearly wants to be an iPad alternative but we can’t say the name they chose for it is very inspirational. The WePad? Really?

Like any tablet out there, we’ll give the WePad a fair chance too, so let’s check out what we already know about this machine. So far we know this little computer is going to offer us an 11.6-inch touchscreen display capable of 1,366 x 768 resolution, an Intel Atom N450 processor clocking at 1.66GHz, GMA 3150 graphics, a 6-hour battery, webcam, 2 USB ports, memory card reader, UMTS modem and Android OS running the show.

We’ll tell you right off that the specs above don’t sound that bad either. Clearly the WePad wants to be better than the iPad since it has extra features like connectivity ports, memory card reader and a webcam. What it doesn’t have is a solid OS. Sure Android is awesome but it’s smartphone-awesome. So is iPhone OS 3.2 by the way so we’d definitely love to see Mac OS X on the iPad.

If you were to buy the WePad, wouldn’t you want to get Chrome OS on it at least, when that becomes available, of course? Or what about Windows 7? The HP Slate, which shapes up to be the main iPad contestant, is going to have somewhat very similar specs to the WePad but will run Microsoft’s finest computer OS.

And just in case you were wondering, the WePad also wants to offer you apps from the WePad App Store (real deal apparently) while also allowing future customers to tap into the Android Market app store. Does Google know about any of that?

The German creators at Neofonie definitely deserve to be congratulated for their efforts. Unlike the HP Slate or the JooJoo, the WePad came out of nowhere and could prove to be a dependable machine. Unfortunately for them I don’t see them being able to create enough buzz around their product.

We have no availability days and prices at this point in time but we’ll be looking forward for an official announcement. Although something tells me the WePad will be cheaper than the iPad, so if you can’t afford the cheapest iPad/HP Slate out there then maybe the WePad will be the tablet you were looking for.