Inevitably, during the discussion of tablet computers, someone chimes in and says Android or the iPad don't provide a complete enough computing experience. iiView's vPad may have the answer.
The $500 tablet is basically Windows 7 Starter Edition stuffed into a 10-inch, 1024-by-600 touch screen display. Specs are what you'd expect to find in a netbook: 1.6GHz Intel atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. The tablet can be configured to include 2 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive and 3G connectivity, and pricing scales up to $699 accordingly.
Downsides? No graphics acceleration, which means you're out of luck watching HD video or playing Flash games. As Notebooks.com points out, this thing is screaming for an Nvidia Ion graphics processor, or some other kind of HD accelerator, not to mention a newer version of Intel's Atom processor.
But add any of those things, and the price creeps up. At that point, you might consider the Archos 9, a $550 Windows 7 tablet that claims to support 1080p video and Flash Web sites. It's also got a 1.3-megapixel Web cam and a slimmer frame, albeit with a smaller screen size than the vPad.
Really, though, I think the most successful tablets won't use full-blown PC operating systems. Instead, they'll bridge the gap between entertainment device and productivity, with fun apps to download and built-in e-readers and media players designed for touch screens. But they'll also allow you to edit documents and create multimedia. Apple's iPad isn't quite there yet on the productivity side, and I'm not sure Android tablets will be up for the task. But on the other hand, Windows tablets like the vPad just aren't fun enough.
