Handful of Android Based Devices with 10 inch screen

Viewsonic’s 10 inch G Tablet is designed to compete with the Galaxy Tab and iPad for your gadget dollars. For an Android tablet to truly go head to head with the Apple iPad, it needs to offer a comparably large 10-inch screen. At first glance, the slate has strong specs: a bright 1024 x 600 display, a front facing webcam, and a powerful dual core Tegra 2 CPU.

At 10.5 x 6.8 x 0.5 inches, the G Tablet isn’t the smallest slate on the block by any stretch. At 1.55 pounds, it weighs as much as the iPad. It’s much bulkier than the iPad and the 7-inch Galaxy Tab, though. The glossy black plastic on the front and the matte black on the back look and feel a bit cheap. We could hear the slate creaking in our hand when we picked it up.

The G Tablet’s spec sheet reads like a dream. It’s running Android 2.2 (though you’d never know it from the interface) on top of an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor with 1GHz of muscle. You’re given 16GB of integrated storage with room to grow via microSD. There’s wireless support for 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 (although no A2DP audio streaming). A 1.3-megapixel Webcam sits above the screen, and common sensors for automatic brightness adjustment and accelerometer control are all here.

Though the G Tablet is powered by Google’s Android 2.2 OS, Viewsonic chose to replace the stock Android interface with a Tap ‘n Tap software. The UI looks friendly on the surface, but its sluggish performance and lame preloaded apps drag the entire device down.

One of the only features of the proprietary Tap ‘n Tap UI that we actually like is its split virtual keyboard. When in landscape mode, the keyboard gets cut down the middle at the line between the G and H keys so you can to type with your thumbs and not have to stretch too far to target those middle keys. When in portrait mode, the keyboard doesn’t split, but does have nice, large keys. Unfortunately, the G Tablet does not support haptic feedback on the keyboard or anywhere else, so you won’t feel any response when you tap the keys. Those who like the Swype keyboard that can use on the Galaxy Tab and other Android devices are also out of luck.

The battery seems fair.  Having a standby mode helps, but even a good five or six hours of tweaking, flashing and fooling around didn’t kill the battery. The G Tablet lasted a whopping 11 hours and 17 minutes, about much longer than the Galaxy Tab (8:30) and the iPad (9 hours). That’s the longest battery life we’ve seen on any tablet, and there was still 6 percent left in reserve.

The ViewSonic G Tablet carves out a unique niche among Android tablets, breaking away from the smartphone to become a type of domestic dashboard. Unfortunately, many key benefits of the Android OS are lost along the way.