Viewsonic is branching out into new markets and their most recent product is the 10″ G Tablet. With a bright 1024 x 600 display, a front-facing webcam, and a powerful dual-core Tegra 2 CPU it seems to have good hardware. It also has a custom Tap n Tap UI and a reasonable starting price of $399. What we will decide is if these things all add up to a great product, or just a mediocre one.

Features

• 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 – Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU
• 512MB DDR2 memory
• 2D/3D Graphics processing
• HD Video encode and decode
• Ultra-low power GeForce GPU
• 1080p video playback processor
• 16GB internal memory (expandable up to 32GB via SD Card)
• 10.1″ TFT-LCD with LED driver system and 1024×600 resolution

Design

The Viewsonic G Tablet measures 7.75″ x 10.5″ x 0.5″ and weighs 1lb 12oz. Compare this to the iPad which measures 7.47″ x 9.56″ x 0.5″ and weighs 1lb 6oz. From these numbers we can see that the G Tablet is slightly larger and heaver, it’s not much, but it’s already falling behind its main competition.

Almost the entire front is taken up with the screen, which is how it should be. However, there is a 1″ space at the bottom, and a 3/4″ space on the sides and top of the screen. I would prefer that the screen goes edge to edge like my phone does, but that does not seem like the trend with tablets.

Front

At the right of the screen (when holding it horizontally) are four touch buttons. They are back, menu, home, and search. These buttons are super sensitive and it is very easy to accidentally press them with your palm when you are holding it. The buttons are not illuminated at all so it is impossible to see them in the dark.

At the top if the screen is a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, and in the top left corner is the light sensor. Unlike the Velocity Cruz tablet we reviewed last week, this sensor is actually hooked up and it is used to auto adjust the brightness of the screen.

The top edge of the tablet has the volume on the left.

Top

The left side has a power plug, headphone jack, speaker, mini USB, and a power button. Behind the little door is a micro SD card slot, and a full size USB port. Keep in mind that this tablet cannot charge via USB, you must use the AC adapter. For me this is a huge negative. I hate carrying around adapters and since I already have USB cables it is just more convenient to charge that way.

Left

Left

The bottom of the tablet has a docking port in the middle, and the microphone on the left.

Bottom

Docking Port

The right side is bare except for a speaker.

Right

Just like the Cruz tablet, the G tablet does not include the Google Market, but it does have an alternate. The G Tablet uses the Handango market. This is much like the Cruz market and is just a website with downloadable apps.

Handango Market

As I mentioned above the G Tablet uses the Tap n Tap interface. At first glance it looks like it would be very user friendly, but instead it is sluggish and comes with only a few widgets that aren’t very exciting. These widgets are spread around on three screens and they include things like weather, news feeds, clock, and a few others. None of these screens are customizable so their usefulness is limited. Fortunately, in the latest update Viewsonic gave us the ability to turn off the Tap n Tap interface and instead use the native android UI. The Native UI gives you 5 fully customizable screens, and it is a lot more responsive than the Tap n Tap UI.

Tap n Tap Home

Performance

Performance testing on a tablet is just like on a PC or Laptop. There are a variety of tools available to test the CPU, memory, graphics, and filesystem. Before we get to the actual tests lets take a look at the hardware inside the Viewsonic G Tablet.

The spec above reads like a wish list for a powerful tablet. I am expecting great things from this tablet and I hope that the benchmarks will validate those expectations.

So the first test I ran on this tablet is called Benchmark. It is a very simple test that goes through the CPU, Memory, Graphics, and filesystem and then displays a score at the end. As you can see from the scores below the G Tablet gets a higher score in every test. This is no surprise because the G Tablet has much better hardware than the rest.

Benchmark

The next test is Quadrant, it is very similar to Benchmark in that it test many aspects of the tablet including, CPU, Memory, I/O, 2D Graphics, and 3D Graphics. However, at the end of this test it just displays a single score for everything instead of individual scores. As you can see the G Tablet once again gets a much higher score.

Quadrant

The next test is called PI. This only tests the CPU and it does this by making it calculate PI and reporting the time it took to complete the task. For this test lower scores are the best. As you can see the G Tablet has the best time for calculating PI. This can clearly be explained by the Dual Core processor.

PI

The next two tests are for graphics. The first test is call fsp2d and simply draws a 2D ball that moves around the screen, the app then calculates the FPS. This time I was surprised to see that my HTC Incredible got a higher score.

fps2d

Finally the last test is Neocore, it renders a 3D video and at the end displays the FPS. The G Tablet just barely squeezes past the Incredible in this test.

Neocore

On to the battery test. Since there isn’t an app yet that does a battery test I had to invent my own. For this test I loaded up the G Tablet with a bunch of movies and played them one after another until the battery died. I also set the screen brightness, and volume to 50% and turned off WiFi. I started the test a 7am and it took all the way until 5:20pm for the battery to run out. That is an amazing 10 hours and 20 minutes.

So now that we are done with the hardware tests I want to share a few thoughts and experiences with you

One of the biggest selling points of Android 2.2+ is that it is able to play flash videos. Viewsonic even mentioned in their latest update that they were adding flash support to the G Tablet. However, every time I tried to play a flash video all I would get was an error. This is a big disappointment because this screen is great for watching videos on.

Flash Movie

Another issue I had while playing videos is that they do not resume. Several times when I was watching a video I had to switch away to do something else. When I went back to the video it forced me to start over. Fortunately it was not too difficult to skip ahead to my last position, but the fact that it does not remember the last position is a bummer.

The biggest problem I had with this tablet is the screen. The screen has some major viewing angle problems. As you can see from the image below there are several angles where the screen becomes dark or washed out and is difficult to see. This really only happened when the screen was displaying a dark image. When reading a book with a white background and black text the viewing angles were not as bad. This is actually very surprising to me because Viewsonic is a monitor company and I would have thought they would have done a better job with the screen on the G Tablet.

Screen

Support and Warranty

Viewsonic warranties the G Tablet for only one year, and there are no options to extend the warranty. I worry about this warranty because Tablets are for traveling and when you travel things get bumped around. It is possible that as the tablet is bumped things will comes loose over time and you may not get any help if your warranty is expired. I would really like to see a minimum of a 3 year warranty on products like this. It would really give consumers a sense of peace knowing that the manufacturer stands behind its products.

As far as support goes, Viewsonic offer the usual email, phone, and website.

Conclusion

So I really have mixed feelings about this tablet. As it stands I think there are more negatives than positives, but there is always the prospect of rooting the G Tablet and loading on a custom ROM, however that is beyond the scope of this review. So sticking just with the stock features and performance I have to recommend that you shy away from this Tablet. Even though it has a reasonable $399 price tag it is too limited to recommend. If the screen didn’t have such bad viewing angles, flash worked, and it had better performance then this would be a different story. I have a hard time recommending something that is difficult to use, and difficult to see.

My recommendation to Viewsonic is to quickly release a G Tablet 2. In this tablet all they need to do is fix the screen, and load Android 3.0 as the default ROM. This would be a fantastic tablet and if they could keep the price low it would smoke any other tablet on the market. It would also be a bonus if they would allow the tablet to be charged via USB, but not a requirement.

For now, if Viewsonic would release a new ROM for this tablet that completely replaced the OS with Android 3.0 then I would at least be happy keeping this one. Otherwise I may try loading on a custom ROM, and if that doesn’t fix things then I may have to sell it and wait for something better.