All you Android fans in India, rejoice! We have an Android tablet – and this is before Android tablets have seriously made any inroads into even the United States.

The OlivePad VT100 is a 7 inch touchscreen tablet. At a 7 inches screen-size, I guess we can confidently call this a tablet and not a smartphone. Five inches is the size of the Dell Streak Android tablet – and that is just an inch wider, diagonally, than the largest smartphones. Take a look at photos of the OlivePad, and you can see that this is quite a handsome device too.

The OlivePad is not just a touchscreen tablet running Android. It is 3G enabled, which you can get really fast browsing speeds on it. True, we only have MTNL and BSNL offering 3G currently. But that will change soon as India’s 3G auction is over, and we will have private players offering 3G too. And that is when the OlivePad VT100 might possibly become a hit.

The OlivePad VT100 is not available in the market yet – that will happen in the third week of August, according to the company. They expect to sell around 1 lakh units in six months after launch.

We were also happy to note that what the OlivePad has here is a capacitive touchscreen – not a resistive one. Related: Touchscreen phones in India

The version of Android you will get is the 2.1 flavour. The company has said that the OlivePad VT100 will be upgradeable to Android 2.2 by October. By then, of course, there might be another flavour of Android for you to drool over.

Built-in GPS and Maps from MapMyIndia and Google Maps

It is Android, from Google – so acess to Google Maps was a given. However, it seems the company also has an agreement with MapMyIndia to provide their maps on the OlivePad VT100. This means that if you have one of these, you do not need a separate GPS unit in your car at all. And that can only be good news.

OlivePad VT100 – technical specifications

Considering that there are 1 GHz processors in smartphones now, the Qualcomm  600 MHz ARM11 processor seems a little meek – but you can’t compare a 1 GHz Snapdragon to a 600 MHz ARM, so we will reserve our comments there. RAM is at a very nice 512 MB. Internal memory storage is not great at just 512 MB, you can use a microSD card and expand it up to 32 GB. Related: 3G mobile phones in India

There is no mention of a flash to aid the 3 megapixel camera in low-light conditions. There is a separate front-facing VGA camera too. It supports 3G video calling, and that should be quite tempting at least in the initial days after purchase!

It would not matter to you if you are already an iPad convert – but otherwise, the OlivePad VT100 can play Adobe Flash movies or apps without any problem.

The company claims a battery life of 16 hours of standby and seven hours of talk-time. The Android tablet supports 720p video playback and is compatible with a wide variety of audio and video formats such as MP3, AVI, MP4 and 3GP. And probably, you would be able to download some multimedia player apps from the Android market which would play a few more.

We are a little confused about how you would make a phone call from the OlivePad. Perhaps, you would use the built-in speakerphone and microphone, or use a separate headset. Holding it in your hands the way you would a smartphone is going to get real uncomfortable real soon.

Apart from that, our opinion is that the OlivePad VT100 is a great buy at this price.