ViewSonic gTablet... Meh

I bought the ViewSonic gTablet for my mom for a Mother's Day present earlier this year.  At $299, it seemed to be a good deal. At first, she liked it, but then inexplicable force closes occurred. She said she didn't want it anymore, but later in the year, when I visited her, I was able to reinstall the apps and it's generally working again.

I bought it for her so she could have an easy way to surf the Internet, check her e-mail, etc, such as doing it from the sofa while watching TV.

It was probably a good purchase at the time, but now, if I had to do it all over again, I would opt for a different tablet. Below are the pros and cons of the tablet based on the standard software.

 Pretty good screen when viewing from front

 Price
 USB host - although I have not tried it yet
 I actually like the Tap UI for my mom

 1.0 GHz Tegra 2 dual core processor, but dual core is not enabled

 Not difficult to root to load Android Market

 1.8 pounds is actually rather heavy for a tablet

 Poor viewing angles

 High quality YouTube videos stutter (not always though)

 Bluetooth HID profile not supported

 Android 2.2

 Tap UI dock bar has only support for fixed number of apps

 Dashboard does not support widgets

 Dashboard photo app does not support access to private Picasa Web albums

 Loading additional soft keyboards require root access

I'm going to be generous and give it a 3* (out of 5). However, even at $250, I would not recommend this tablet. Half of the negative points I list above could be addressed through a software upgrade. Thus, it seems to really take advantage of this tablet, you'd need to load a custom ROM.