MWC 2010 Live: ViewSonic ViewPad 7, 10 & 10s Hands-on Preview

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The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, is the perfect home for smartphones and tablets of all sizes. And we keep playing with one device after the other in search of the best mobile products money can buy, or at least will be able to buy in the near future.

Today we checked out ViewSonic tablets, the ViewPad 7, 10 and 10s. From the get-go I’ll tell you that they aren’t really impressing us with any particular specs and features right off the bat. And while they don’t appear to be ready to fight the iPads or the Xooms out there, the ViewPads could turn out to be some very affordable solution to your modern mobile needs.

The ViewPads aren’t really breaking news and that’s why we’re showing you a joint hands-on session of these three handsets.

The ViewPad 7 is an ultraportable Android 2.2 Froyo tablet which says it all. We want Honeycomb, but there’s no telling when that will arrive. The ViewPad 7 is kind-of thick but that won’t prevent you from enjoying a mobile web browsing experience. The device comes with two cameras, which means it’s ready for video calls, something the iPad can’t perform just yet.

The ViewPad 10 is a bigger tablet version and the device I like the least from the three. Why? Well I have a very simple yet complex reason, Windows 7. That’s right this tablet is a dual-booting device that comes with both Windows 7 and Android on board. It has a powerful 1.66GHz processor under the hood but that doesn’t mean Windows 7 won’t crash. In fact that’s exactly what happened with one of the devices I was using, and, mind you, I was present pretty early in the morning at ViewSonic’s booth so it’s not like the anxious crowds were overusing it.

Last but not least we have the ViewPad 10s, a much better looking and a lot more powerful device. Inside you’ll find NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 platform ready to put this Android Froyo tablet to good use. Too bad it’s not Honeycomb, but one can only hope the device will be upgraded in due time. The ViewPad 10s will come with 1080p HDMI support, USB connectivity and, naturally, Flash 10.1.

The ViewSonic series of tablets really need a flagship device to make them popular. The ViewPad 10s could be it but it still lacks a certain magic that would make it appealing with the crowds.