While tablets may seem like a dime a dozen these days, their prices are hardly that. With companies competing for your hard-earned dimes, choosing a tablet can be a daunting task for the budget-minded.
Viewsonic is changing the tablet market with its Android (News - Alert)-based gadget, the ViewPad 7e. The price? A mere pittance of $199.99, making it an attractive and affordable piece of equipment.
The Viewsonic ViewTab 7e features a 7-inch display with 800×600 resolution, a 1GHz processor, 4GB of internal storage with microSD support for adding up to an additional 32GB, rear and front-facing cameras at 3 and 0.3-megapixels, respectively. Unfortunately, the ViewPad 7e won’t be running any type of tablet-based Android OSs such as Honeycomb or the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich. Instead, the ViewPad 7e will run Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which was designed for phones.
“Our ViewPad tablet line offers a robust assortment of solutions designed to meet every individual’s mobile computing needs – spanning from business to entertainment,” said Michael Holstein, vice president of business development, ViewSonic in a press release. “The ViewPad 7e extends our quality commitment to consumers that want an excellent mobile multimedia experience, at a very aggressive price point.”
The ViewPad 7e will be available in North America before this month is out.
The tablet, while ranking pretty cheap by comparison, is not actually the cheapest tablet on the market out there. In fact, DataWind unveiled the world’s cheapest tablet in India known as Ubislate7. The Ubislate7 is expected on the market in early December and goes for Rs. 2,999, which equates to $60 USD.
Tablets are all a buzz this week in the news, especially Amazon’s Kindle Fire which will feature Kindle Format 8, or KF8.
KF8 replaces its previous format, Mobi 7. Ready to hit the market on November 15, KF8 will also support HTML5.
The support of HTML5 comes with the promise of all good things that it can do, like improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices. That translates to support for CSS3, fixed layouts, embedded fonts, drop caps, floating elements, text on background images, lists and a few other bells and whistles.
Michelle Amodio is a TMCnet contributor. She has helped promote companies and groups in all industries, from technology to banking to professional roller derby. She holds a bachelor's degree in Writing from Endicott College and currently works in marketing, journalism, and public relations as a freelancer.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
