The Digital Reader

Viewsonic’s newest budget tablet cleared the FCC yesterday.

The Viewpad 7e showed up at IFA-Berlin a few weeks back, and it looked like a very pretty tablet in the video. It’s based on a 7″ (800×600) 2-finger resistive touchscreen (it still works with styluses). The 7e is running Android v2.3 Gingerbread on a 1GHz Samsung Cortex-A8 CPU. It  has Bluetooth, Wifi, a microSD card slot, 4GB Flash storage, 2 cameras, and it has HDMI out.

The 7e is also running a custom interface on top of gingerbread and while I didn’t get a good look at it I have to say that it looks interesting. The 7e also ships with a number of apps, including the Kindle and other Amazon apps, Youtube, Angry Birds, Twitter, ES File Explorer, and the usual media apps.

Well, not all the usual media apps. The 7e comes with Amazon mp3 and that’s a new one for me. Clearly Amazon are pushing to get their media apps on to more devices; I guess it’s simialr to their rumored plan for the Kindle Tablet.

When I last covered the Viewpad 7e, I believed that it was the same hardware as the Pandigital Nova. They have everything from the cameras to the odd touchscreen in common. I was looking forward to when the 7e went through the FCC, because  I thought the internal photos would reveal similar circuit boards.

I pulled up the FCC paperwork for the Nova and compared the internal photos of the 2 tablets. While the case might look incredibly similar, the guts do not. The circuit boards look completely different. Even so, I think these tablets are related; the similarities in the cases are simply to improbable to be a coincidence. In fact, the FCC paperwork gives a clue about the hardware differences; the Nova doesn’t have Bluetooth and the 7e does. That minor addition could explain the different circuit boards.

The Viewpad 7e also went up for pre-order on Amazon a couple seeks ago. Retail is $199.

FCC