Viewsonic is the first company to announce plans to go after Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, a 7-inch tablet with sub $200 price.

Viewsonic plans a $199 tablet with 1 GHz single core processor, 7-inch screen, Android 2.3 with Amazon app market and 4GB internal storage. This is not all, as the tablet has a 3Mpixel rear and 0.3 Mpixel front facing camera, micro HDMI and micro SD slot for additional 32GB of storage.

The OS interface is 3D capable and should look funky and let's not forget that some other Amazon services such as Kindle application will also come preinstalled. Viewsonic also plans to preinstall like Twitter, TuneIn Radio and WildTangent games and thinks that flash browsing, overall browsing and purchasing online, or social networking should work great on this device.

ViewPad 7 has a 800x600 LED backlit display and Rite technology multi-touch capability that should be easy to write on. Viewsonic also includes the popular Swipe keyboard that works well with a few key languages, especially English.

In terms of content, 1080p playback is possible via Micro HDMI and Flash 10.3 applications will run just fine. The tablet has 802.11g/b/n capable wireless as well as Bluetooth and over the air update support. The tablet launches in the USA at the end of October, more or less this week, at $199.99 while Latin America will get to buy it as of November. European and the rest of the world availability were not discussed.

This tablet becomes attractive as it has cameras, something that Kindle Fire doesn't feature, but at the same time, Fire has more storage 8GB (6GB of which is available), has a better IPS display with 1024x600 and has a lot of content on its palms.

This still gives you an alternative for the same money, as some people will miss camera support really badly.