Viewsonic ViewPad 10s review

While the software may be flaky, the ViewPad’s hardware feels tough as nails. It feels fairly heavy at 730g, but this adds to the sense of sturdiness, and there’s no flex in the case at all. Although the entire front surface is glass, there’s an inch of bezel surrounding the actual screen, making the interface feel cramped. It’s extremely responsive to touch – possibly too responsive, which can lead to mis-clicks – but it lacks an oleophobic coating so quickly becomes a smudge of greasy fingerprints.

Viewing angles aren’t that good either, especially when you use the ViewPad lying flat on the desk in front of you – the narrow vertical angles play havoc with the image’s contrast, whereas viewing it from above has less impact. The glossy finish also means that bright overhead lights will be reflected. The built-in accelerometer does a good job of flipping the screen to suit your reading angle, and we liked the switch that you can use to lock the screen’s orientation.

There’s also a physical “Back” button along the top edge. Rather than implement Home and Menu as physical buttons, Viewsonic has instead added them as extra icons on the notification bar, which is stretched vertically to make them fit. This has the knock-on effect of making normal app notification icons much larger, ruining their crisp graphics.

Although the dual-core Tegra 2 processor is capable of decoding HD video, you can’t watch it in its full glory on the 1,024×600 screen. We did find the ViewPad extremely quick, with snappy transitions between screens.

Aside from the larger amount of storage, the ViewPad 10s is essentially almost identical to the Advent Vega. We don’t feel the larger memory card is worth the extra £26, when you can pick up a 16GN MicroSD card for £11, and installing the Market is trickier than on the Vega.