While CES may not have been terribly impressive in regards to showing new Android devices, I did notice that a lot of less recognized companies started to double down on Android, and show multiple models. Viewsonic came out with new Android smartphones, 7″ tablets, and 10.1″ tablets as well.
The ViewPad 10pi is a dual-boot tablet that has both Windows 7 and Android 2.3, because it runs on an Atom CedarTrail CPU, and has a resolution of 1280×800 on an IPS display. The bad news is that this single core tablet costs as much as $849, and while the idea of dual booting may be tempting at first, it’s hardly useful if the battery lasts a lot less, and you have to pick between 2 OS’s that are not very optimized for tablets at all : Windows 7 and Android 2.3.
The ViewPad 10e is an ARM-based tablet, and not surprisingly promises a lot better standby life of over 200 hours. It’s also slimmer at 9.1mm, and will cost about 3x less than the Atom one with Windows 7 – only $279. The only downside is that again it runs Android 2.3, which isn’t very optimized for tablets, and they should at least announce when they are going to upgrade them to Android 4.0, if ever.
Another of their devices is the ViewPhone3, a dual-SIM phone, with a 3.5″ screen and a 800 Mhz processor, which seems to be targeted at the low-end market. The phone will also cost $279 and should be available in Q1 this year. The phone seems to be running Android 2.3 as well, but with the SPB Shell on top (a 3rd party skin).
Finally, Viewsonic has an Android 4.0 device, too, which is a 7″ tablet, called ViewSonic 7e that will only cost $170. The other 7″ tablet, the Viewsonic 7x, is a dual core Tegra 2 tablet that is running Honeycomb. Both tablets will be using the Amazon apps and services, so you won’t officially have the Android Market in it, but you can probably install it later if you want. You can take a look at them in the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkZfElQSvp8&feature=player_embedded