Team Android

A couple of weeks ago woot.com was selling a Viewsonic GTab 10″ tablet for $280.

This has a Dual Core Tegra proc, with all the bells and whistles. Right out of the box, the hacked up version of Android that is installed leaves quite a bit to be desired.

With a little help from XDA you can install then VEGAnTab Gingerbread ROM. This makes the tablet much more usable. It also adds quite a bit of eye candy to what is dull straight out of the box.

While this tablet is fast, and works very well, it has 2 flaws that I consider to be a big deal.

1. The tablet is heavy. It is just uncomfortable to hold for any length of time.

2. There is a major glare issue. You have to be holding the tablet at just the right angle to be able to use it. Any other angle and you can use the tablet as a mirror to pick your teeth or see what is going on behind you.

Was this the right tablet for me, nah… Will other people find this to be suitable, I am quite sure of it. This tablet seems to have quite a following on XDA. You can check it out here:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=841

On a plus side, I found this tablet to be very easy to root and install a custom ROM. On the downside, if you flash back to stock, Viewsonic had an update floating around for a couple of days that will turn your tablet into a brick. I was one of those unlucky individuals. Viewsonic did ask that I send them the tablet so they could fix it once they found out that I applied the OTA update. This appears to be a common issue after talking to the tech who assisted me. So, I sent mine in to Viewsonic and I should be getting it back very soon.
As an FYI, It will be going up for sale once I get it back.

Walking through Best Buy last week I ran across a 7″ tablet that I couldn’t remember reading anything about. The Huawei Ideos S7 Slim. I played with it in the store for a bit and found it to be very impressive. So I went home a did some looking around on line and all I could find where some small posts saying that it was coming soon.

I went back and tested it some more. This little tablet is impressive.

This cool little tablet packs a 1Ghz proc, 512M of RAM, GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, Capacitive Touchscreen and will accept up to a 32G Micro SD Card. (Some sites are reporting that it will only work with an 8G)

I picked one up, curiosity got the best of me. All I can say is Awesome. Everything works right out of the box. I spent most of today playing with the tablet and not getting any actual work done.

This little thing will set you back an even $300. But, I think it is well worth it.

I have run across a few small issues with it, and am waiting on support to get back to me. I discovered that if you install a 3rd party launcher such as VTL or LP, they will work great until you reboot the tablet. If you have any other launcher installed, upon reboot, the tablet will not respond to any input. The touchscreen just doesn’t work.

To get around this, I used adb and removed the launchers that I had installed and then rebooted the tablet. After this reboot everything worked fine.

The other issue I found is that right out of the box, Swype reports that it is expired.

I emailed support to find out why each issue is happening.

Don’t get me wrong the default launcher isn’t all that bad and is very functional, but I still prefer LP.

Now don’t get all confused and buy the original version that only had a 768Mhz proc and a resistive touchscreen. The new model isn’t even on display yet in all of the Best Buy stores that I wandered into. The Best Buy where I picked up this one, still had the old model on display.

All things considered, this is a very good deal if you find that a 10″ tablet just isn’t for you. I am very happy with this and will more than likely be keeping it around for a while.