At CES, NEC's showing off the hinged Android tablet it teased last month, pitching it as a great way for third parties to... well, do awesome stuff. They're kind of leaving the doors wide open as to how (or to whom) it'll be sold, suggesting it could make a great e-reader, a digital notebook for students, a scrapbook, or whatever devs dream up. The "Cloud" part of the "Cloud Communicator" name means that NEC thinks the LT-W would be great for generic cloud services, but really, it's just an Android 2.1 tablet with WiFi, Bluetooth, and optional 3G -- there's nothing special in here that makes it particularly well-adapted for magically pulling data out of the cloud.

Unfortunately -- cloud or otherwise -- we didn't come away with a very positive impression of this thing. Our very first red flag was the stylus, which matches up with a pair of 800 x 600 resistive touchscreens that don't seem particularly bright or contrasty. Some of NEC's sample apps (which you can see in the video after the break) make decent use of the dual display setup, but nothing blew us away -- and more importantly, everything seemed just a little too jerky for a Cortex-A8 core. If NEC were to remix this with a Tegra 2, two capacitive touchscreens, and Honeycomb, we might be singing a different tune... but for now, this seems like little more than a Courier gone wrong.