Ah, Windows tablet — all your desktop applications in a highly-portable, touchscreen machine. Sure, Windows 7 sucks as a touch-based OS, but the promise of full versions of Photoshop in a slate form factor is just too tempting a concept for manufacturers to resist. The Viewsonic Viewpad 10Pro doesn’t only have Windows 7 on board — it brings Android with it, too, in a two-platforms-in-one pairing.
Billed as “the world’s first dual-OS tablet,” it’s a tempting machine indeed. That is, until you actually figure out what’s going on. It doesn’t actually dual boot into Windows and Android, as most would naturally assume. Instead, it’s a Windows 7 tablet with Bluestacks virtualization software and Google’s mobile OS pre-installed. Yes, you run Android as a Windows application using that. Meh.
The Viewsonic ViewPad 10Pro runs Windows 7 Professional, with the added gimmick of having Android accessible as an application. Hopefully, they did some thorough customizations for the virtualization to make it run smoothly (we all know how virtualized stuff sometimes can little tricky on Windows machines). Regardless, the inclusion of a way to use Android does add some extra value, especially if you can use it seamlessly.
Details of the tablet include Intel’s Oak Trail Z670 1.5GHz processor, a 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen, 32GB of onboard storage (expandable via MicroSD or USB), 3G connectivity and a 3,500 mAh battery module (rated at 4.5 hours of 1080p playback). No word on whether they threw in a finger-friendlier skin for the Windows UI (we’re guessing not, since there’s no mention of it).
No pricing or release dates have been given, but the Viewsonic ViewPad 10Pro is currently on exhibit at the Computex 2011 trade show.
[via Engadget]