14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that, while some market segments are suffering from oversupply, ViewSonic is, one would say, plagued by the opposite, at least as far as a certain tablet PC is concerned.
Like many of its so-called rivals, ViewSonic decided, some time ago, that it would try to grab a slice of the tablet market now, when it was taking form, after which its business would grow along with the market segment itself.
Thus, the company came up with the ViewPad 7, a model whose screen has a size of 7 inches and which is powered by the ARM architecture.
The company is, of course, not the only one with tablets already on sale, but it is one of the only three companies selling them on the Taiwan market, the others being Samsung and Apple.
Basically, according to a report made by Digitimes, ViewSonic is in the unfortunate situation of having insufficient supply of the ViewPad 7.
For instance, the outfit sold 5,000 of them at Taiwan's IT Month consumer trade show alone, which is in tune with how 60% of all of its tablet sales are accounted for by this product. The other 40% are made up of ViewPad10 tablet PCs.
For those needing a reminder, the ViewPad7 tablet runs on an ARM application processor with a frequency of 600 MHz.
It also boasts a touchscreen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, plus 512 MB of internal memory and an SD card slot that lets on add up to 32 GB Flash storage space.
There is also a 3 megapixel webcam on the back, plus a front-facing 0.3 megapixel one on the front and a built-in GPS receiver, among other things.
ViewSonic expects both its 7-inch and 10-inch slates to start enjoying more shipments, not just during the Lunar New Year holidays but for the first quarter of 2011 as a whole.
What remains to be seen is if the new slates that the company plans to launch starting in the second quarter will be able to fight off the competition from other brand vendors, which are poised to release their own devices around that same time.