The word "tablet" is thrown around a lot these days, but the upcoming Vega tablet from ICD is exactly what you'd expect: a slim, simple device that's meant to be touched.
The Vega will come in 7-inch, 11-inch and 15-inch sizes, with a resistive screen that in the largest size has a resolution of 1366-by-768. NVidia's Tegra processor will handle the graphics, so you'll probably be able to do some modest 3D gaming, as we've seen recently in the Zune HD. A built-in accelerometer could help with that, but I'm not sure you'll want to be steering a big tablet, so that feature's probably for shifting between portrait and landscape modes.
Other specs include 512MB of DDR DRAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 and of 512 MB of built-in NAND Flash, expandable with MicroSD cards. The largest device, which ICD appears to be promoting the heaviest, weighs 2.8 pounds and lasts for roughly four hours on a charge, reports Gizmodo.
The operating system is Google's Android 2.0, also known as "Eclair." There's no talk of any custom user interface, so the experience could be a lot like Motorola's Droid smartphone. ICD talks of "full featured High Definition entertainment" and "streaming media," so it seems like this is geared towards pleasure rather than business. Let's hope that 4-hour battery time includes watching video.
It's nice to hear ICD refer to the Vega as a "low priced" device, though we don't know the cost yet. 2G and 3G capabilities are included, so we might see subsidies from a wireless carrier, but this device will have to stay pretty low on price, or else Apple's rumored tablet could threaten. I want to actually see the Vega in action, but the idea of a big-screen Android tablet has me intrigued.
