Viewsonic has created a storm in the budget tablet market with the introduction of its ViewPad 7e, carrying a price tag of $200, which is the price of Amazon Kindle Fire too. Amazon entered the tablet market with its debut tablet ‘Kindle Fire’, which has a 7” multi touch display and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for connectivity; also, a dual core processor powers the tablet. Amazon was the late entrant into the tablet market where there is plenty of 7” tablet models already. Amazon used the pricing strategy to make a breakthrough in the market. Of course, it worked well; Kindle Fire became popular instantly, because of its price. Just for $200, you can own a tablet made it popular. However, now there is a competitor for Amazon Kindle Fire from Viewsonic. The ViewPad 7e, also priced at $200, features a 7” display, and it also has both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for connectivity. It is an Android tablet based on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and has dual cameras too. Amazon is using its rich collection of books/music/movies and the existing Amazon services to attract customers. ViewPad 7e also has integrated Amazon services. In this article, we compare the features and performances of both the devices in detail for the benefit of readers.
Viewsonic ViewPad 7e vs Amazon Kindle Fire
ViewPad 7e is the latest addition to the ViewPad tablet series by Viewsonic. It was officially released in October 2011. Kindle Fire is Amazon’s debut in the tablet market, which was announced in September 2011. The devices will be available in the market from November 2011.
Kindle Fire stands 7.5” tall and 4.7” wide and has a thickness of 0.45”. ViewPad 7e is 7.6” tall and 5.16” wide and has a thickness of 0.6 “. Therefore, between the two devices, ViewPad 7e is the bigger and bulkier than Kindle Fire. ViewPad 7e is little heavier too. Kindle Fire weighs 413 g while ViewPad 7e is nearly 450 g; both cannot be called lightweight devices.
The display of Kindle Fire is a 7”LCD multi-touch screen with 1024 x 600 pixels resolution. The display also uses IPS technology for wide viewing angle (178°) and anti reflective. ViewPad 7e is complete with a 7” TFT LCD multi-touch screen with 800 x 600 pixels resolution. Between the two devices, Kindle Fire has a higher pixel density than ViewPad 7e (Kindle Fire 169ppi and ViewPad 7e 143ppi). However, ViewPad 7e supports Rite touch technology for Stylus input. It also has a swype keyboard for faster text input. Kindle Fire display is made of hardened plastic. Amazon claims that it is 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than the plastic.
Kindle Fire is powered by 1GHz dual core TI OMAP 4430 processor, and a 1 GHZ single core Hummingbird processor powers ViewPad 7e. Comparing the processing power of both the devices, Kindle Fire is better than ViewPad 7e; Kindle Fire is nearly twice faster than ViewPad 7e. The memory detail of Kindle Fire is not revealed yet. ViewPad 7e has 512 MB DDR2 RAM. We can expect Kindle Fire to feature a similar size RAM. Coming to the storage, Kindle Fire has only 8GB of internal storage, out of which more than 2GB is preloaded with applications, so what is left for the user is nearly 6GB of storage space. The storage cannot be expanded, as there is no SD card slot. ViewPad 7e has 4GB only; however, it supports expansion upto 32GB via microSD card. Amazon offers cloud storage free for their content; ViewPad 7e too has Cloud Player service for Amazon content such as Amazon MP3 and ebooks.
For connectivity, both have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. ViewPad 7e has micro HDMI TV out that supports up to 1080p video playback, which is not there in Kindle Fire.
ViewPad 7e has a 3.1 megapixels rear-facing camera and a 0.3 megapixels front facing VGA camera for video chat. Kindle Fire does not feature either of the cameras.
Battery is another important component for tablet/pad. Amazon claims that Kindle Fire has 7.5 hours of battery life with video playing, but Wi-Fi off or 8 hours of reading with Wi-Fi off. ViePad 7e has a standard Li-ion 3300 mAh battery with a rated 5 hours battery life with Wi-Fi on.
Looking at the software; ViewPad 7e runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and ViewScene 3D for UI. It supports Abobe Flash Player 10.3 for seamless browsing. Although, underlying Kindle Fire is the Android OS, it is heavily customized by Amazon. Amazon boasts of 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, games, applications, books, and magazines that accessible to the Kindle users. Amazon also introducing the ‘Amazon Silk’ cloud accelerated browser for surfing, which it call as revolutionary split browser, instead of the WebKit browser. Amazon Silk supports Adobe flash, and has features like bookmarks, tabbed browsing, tap for zooming in and out etc. ViewPad 7e also has integrated Amazon services such as Amazon MP3 store, Amazon Kindle for Android e-book reader and store, and Amazon App store for Android.
Both, ViewPad 7e by Viewsonic and Kindle Fire by Amazon, are good options for those who want to experience the tablet for the first time, at an affordable price. While Kindle Fire has some positive aspects such as dual core processor, ViewPad 7e has some other features such as dual cameras.