Viewsonic ViewPad 10 Pro to pack Oak Trail chip and dual OS

The Viewsonic ViewPad 10 is the successor of the interesting, but not to stellar ViewPad 10, which was a 10 inch tablet able to boot from both Windows and Android. The tablet was decent in terms of looks and hardware, but it wasn’t polished enough to gain a significant following. Viewsonic actually announced shortly after launch that they intend to take the concept to a different level and that the ViewPad 10 should be seen just as a stepping stone for greater things.

And the greater thing here is the ViewPad 10 Pro, which will pack an Z670 Oak Trail, 1.5 GHZ processor, Intel’s newest entry on the mobile market. The processor can support other operating systems except Windows, and a bunch of Z670 tablets, running Android and MeeGo, are supposedly in the making from a bunch of major players. The processor is optimized for mobile devices, taking in less power than Atom chips, without sacrificing performance (actually, Oak Trail chips are said to be faster than Atom processors). Also, it supports 1080p playback, making it a good choice for 10 inch tablets with hi res screens.

Back to the Pro, you should know that the slate will boot from Windows 7 and Android 2.2. Actually, you can only boot from Windows 7 and you can run Android via a virtual machine that turns Google’s mobile OS into a Windows app. The advantage is that you don’t have to shut down the tablet every time you want to run Android, but you’ll probably won’t be able to upgrade to anything post Android 2.2.

In terms of hardware, the ViewPad 10 Pro has a 1024 x 600 screen, (probably) 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, 32 GB mSATA storage, as well as a 3G module, WiFi and Bluetooth. Ports include SD and HDMI, but there’s place for a USB port as well. The battery is said to run on a single charge for about 5 hours on video playback, and probably much longer if you’re going to do less demanding stuff with it.

The slate is not necessarily very slim and only has a 1.3 MP front facing camera, as well as packing a G sensor and accelerometer. For now, this is all the info we’ve got on Viewsonic’s (not quite) dual OS tablet and we’ll tell you more as steamy info comes our way. Besides this one, we were told to expect over 10 new Android tablets running on Intel chips. We’ve got our baskets ready.