“It isn’t about ice cream sandwich and quad core processor. Consumers are crying out for affordable tablets to go alongside the iPad and its rivals, and we’re gradually seeing the quality of these cheaper offerings improve as the technology matures.
ViewSonic is the latest to go low-budget, with its viewpad 10c coming in at less than £200.That’s good £80 lower than last year’s ViewPad 10S, yet the design is hugely improved. Gone is the uncomfortably wide aspect ration, in favor of a 9.7 in 1,024 X 768 IPS screen.Its thinner, too, at 9 mm thick and weighs a healthy 620g. It has the usual Back, Home and Settings touch buttons beneath the screen, along with micro-USB and mini-HDMI ports, and a micro SD slot to add storage.
It’s comfortable to hold although there’s an odd strip of plastic along one edge of the rear that bends when pressed – and the IPS screen does a much better job than we expected on a cheap tablet. We measured the brightness at 342cd/m2 and contrast at 743:1, leaving the resolution as the only major issue. It doesn’t feel quite as sharp and clear as it should, particularly when dealing with small text in the browser. The large icons of Android 2.3 doesn’t help this ; the absence of Android 3 is a disappointment at a time when Android 4 devices are arriving. It isn’t the only compromises, either : the built storage tops out at a mere 4Gb, there’s no rear camera , the 1 GHz ARM Cortex A* processor is a single-core and it has only 512 MB of RAM. As a result, performance is hardly stellar; the ViewPad 10c took, 7,013 ms to compete SunSpider benchmark – by no means a terrible time , but some distance behind the 2, 108 ms of the iPad 2 for example.
Price: £160
Key Spec:
- Single Core 1 Ghz ARM Processor
- 512 MB RAM
- 4GB Storage -
- 9.7 in 1,024 X 768 IPS TFT
- 802.11 in Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth
- 1.3 MP front camera
- micro-SD
- micro-USB
- mini-HDMI
- 241 X 9.1 X 189mm(WDH)
- 620g
