ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro review

Dual-boot Android 2.2 and Windows 7 on a slate tablet sounds clever, but does it work?

ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro
This 10.1-inch tablet runs an Android OS designed for smartphones

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ViewSonic viewpad 10pro

App selection is just average on the ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro – good, but not great. The ViewPad comes with a few apps for Windows 7.

One app called vsPresenter is designed for running presentations from the ViewPad, which is a logical use. The app functions about the same way as the Windows control panel for switching your display to the secondary screen.

ViewSonic viewpad 10pro

Another app called ViewDraw enables you to draw anywhere on the screen and save the file. The idea is to use the app for annotating a presentation, but it also works well with the slate tablet.

ViewSonic also includes a management app that's essentially just a link to the Windows 7 functions you can find through the Start menu anyway.

ViewSonic viewpad 10pro

Of course, the real draw here is the Android 2.2 operating system. A few of the included apps worked fine – we tested the Pulse news reader and the Twitter client, plus about a dozen other apps that were pre-installed, and they worked smoothly, if a bit slowly.

When we tried installing additional Android apps, however, the ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro started having some serious problems.

ViewSonic viewpad 10pro

We couldn't even install Angry Birds or the Wooden Labyrinth 3D app. Fruit Ninja failed to load. Oddly, in all of these cases, the download proceeds just fine and the install process completes, but an error appears stating that the app install failed.

This is because Android 2.2 is a smartphone operating system that has been retrofitted to work on a tablet, and here it's running in a virtual window. ViewSonic said it's working on the problem.

John Brandon
Contributor

John Brandon has covered gadgets and cars for the past 12 years having published over 12,000 articles and tested nearly 8,000 products. He's nothing if not prolific. Before starting his writing career, he led an Information Design practice at a large consumer electronics retailer in the US. His hobbies include deep sea exploration, complaining about the weather, and engineering a vast multiverse conspiracy.

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