Hands-On: Panasonic Viera Tablets - Tablet Hands-On Roundup

This one came out of nowhere for me, so I was pretty interested. I had no idea that Panasonic had anything to do with the Android tablet game until I got a text from my best friend telling me to check out their new tablets. When I made my way to the Panasonic booth, I found that they had three new tablets, in 4”, 7”, and 10” sizes. All three are running a stock version of Android 2.2 and have Panasonic’s Viera Connect online video on demand service built in.

Panasonic seems to envision these tablets as television companions that connect to the latest Viera plasma HDTVs, with the press release touting ability to act as a “visual remote control” to operate the TV, or using the tablet as a sub-screen to view sports from different angles. It’s an interesting concept, but the Viera services only work with Viera TVs, so the user base is very limited.

The hardware is no great shakes either - the prototype units that Panasonic showed off on the show floor didn’t wow us on the design side, and the build quality was positively off-putting. We can put the shoddy build down to being early build preproduction units, but the design, with a lot of chrome plastic, a large bezel, and an expanse of silver plastic on the back, left a lot to be desired.

Panasonic wasn’t disclosing the specs of any of the three Vieras, but I had a chance to run Browsermark and SunSpider on them. The results I got from the 7” and 10” were consistent with tablets running 1GHz Cortex A9 processors, so it’s likely that they are running either Tegra 2 or OMAP 4 underhood. We’ve heard rumours that Panasonic chose to go with TI, but Panasonic refused to confirm or deny that. The 4” model had results more in line with A8-based processors, so I’d guess that it’s running OMAP 3, but again, Panasonic wasn’t willing to disclose any of the specs.

Overall though, Panasonic’s Viera line as a whole seems pretty mediocre unless you evaluate them as remotes for the Viera plasma TV line. As blandly designed tablets running Android 2.2 in the era of Honeycomb, they fail to stand out compared to similar tablets from other manufacturers, and I think Panasonic has a fair amount of work to do before the Vieras become compelling products in the tablet space.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrAp5utnZOde6S7zGiqoaenZIFyf5doq5qanJrBbrTAp5usZZ%2BjerO71Kebrqhfag%3D%3D