ViewSonic, of course, does not, and would not, ever market a tablet as the iPad 2 lite - but pick up the ViewSonic ViewPad E100 and it's hard to think of anything else.

Sitting among its friends on the stand at Mobile World Congress 2012, it's all too obvious that the potential buyers for this Android tablet are people who would very much like an iPad 2 but would rather pay half the price. Unlike the far bulkier ViewPads G70, E70 and P100, it has a 4:3 ratio screen, a profile of just 9.1mm and mass of 620g - differing just 20g and 0.3mm from Apple's top keyboardless computer. Throw in the 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 resolution, LED backlit dispay with IPS and it's hard to see much of a difference at all.

Get to playing with the E100 though and the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS is a dead giveaway, but it runs as smoothly as one could hope for - which is very smoothly indeed - thanks to the 1GHz Cortex processor and very responsive capacitive touchscreen.

What you won't get with an iPad 2 is the USB and microSD support to go with the Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi, and proper HDMI. Both a 3G version and a Wi-Fi version are coming to Europe before June priced at £260 and £325 and, on first look, we've been very impressed indeed.