The WeTab is available in Germany – With MeeGo – A virtual Android is coming later

You remember the WeTab, formerly known as WePad, from german company Neofonie? Their initial presentation created a lot of noise in the media, and especially on androidpads.com. Meanwhile, they delivered the proof, that their tablet device is not based on Windows. To be precise, the WeTab runs MeeGo, an open source mobile operating system based on Linux, created by Intel and Nokia.

With MeeGo, the WeTab is capable of running a virtual Android device, so it kind of emulates an Android device. This means that you can open Android in a Window on the WeTab, an idea that is not unclever, but the performance to run Android Apps has to be proven.

Androidpit.com, a german Android site had the occasion to test the Android integration on the WeTab and provided a video of that test run:

(note that the intro is in german, Android testing begins at 1:42)

Unfortunately we can’t see how successful they have been in integrating Android, this still has developer status. On a first sight, it looks pretty promising. Maybe they can manage it to bring it to full screen and with the ongoing development of Android for tablets, it might be really useable. You may have noticed that the Market App is from androidpit too, it will be the only marketplace for the virtual Android on the WeTab, but I don’t doubt that people will find a way to access the official marketplace .

The WeTab is available since 2 days in Germany, but Android will not be integrated yet. It is available from electronics discounter MediaMarkt (you could find it on ebay soon) and through the german Amazon store. There are two versions: The WeTab with 16GB (wifi only) (affiliate link) for 449€ and the WeTab 3G with 32GB (affiliate link) for 569€.

See my older post for the full WeTab specifications.

UPDATE Sept. 23, 2010: German media report that some oft the first clients of the WeTab are not very happy with it. They say that videos are lagging, that the WeTab does not support multitouch and that the touchscreen is not very responsive. Neofonie countered that there will be software updates. BUT there are also troubles with the hardware: The device weighs nearly 200 grams more than promised and it has a noisy fan to cool down the processor (that was not mentioned before)! A fan! That is a clear no-go for such a device…. WeTab-folks, what are you doing?