The WePad seemed to spring up out of nowhere a few weeks ago and although the initial renders looked nice there hasn’t been any actual hands-on video of the device going through its paces until now.
Unfortunately the touchscreen is apparently one of the pieces of the puzzle that hasn’t been placed yet so the demo on the WePad hardware is done using a mouse plugged in via USB (the second device you see in the video is a different slate running the software so don’t infer too much from that.) Obviously the touch experience is critical so it is a bit of a downer that they don’t have it worked out yet; however, the fact that you have not just one, but two USB ports to circumvent that problem is a win.
Specs wise the WePad is very much a slate netbook as it runs on a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N450, integrated GMA 3150 graphics, a 1.3 MP webcam, an SD card reader, bluetooth, and the aforementioned USB ports. There are two models; one includes 16GB storage and WiFi and the other 32GB storage, WiFi, GPS, and 3G. The screen is definitely a highlight at 11.6″ and 1366×768 resolution it could certainly serve up a very nice browsing and multimedia experience.
The current pricing on a straight Euros to U.S. dollars conversion is $608 for the 16GB wifi version and $770 for the 32GB wifi, GPS, and 3G version.
Neofonie, the company behind the WePad, views it foremost as a news consumption device, but it offers a fully featured OS with a browser with full flash support and they intend to get approval for the Android Market as well as the Adobe Air Marketplace.
Take a peak at the video and see what you think; if you like what you see hit the source link at the bottom of the post for a few more videos that they have posted to their YouTube channel.
This is scheduled for release in Germany in July with no word on an international launch date at the moment and that means that it would have a whole lot of competition from the likes of Notion Ink, MSI, HP, Dell, Toshiba, and possibly even Google themselves if it would ever make it to U.S. shores.