TOSHIBA AT200

The iPad 2 is facing some serious competition these days. As the consumer market warms up to the potential of tablet media, there is certainly no shortage of options for us to choose from. And we can certainly thank Android and Apple for that. That said, there is little operationally, to distinguish one android from the other right now, which is where Toshiba’s AT200 can take the moral high ground because it is the lightest and thinnest 10.1 inch tablet on the market. With a depth of just 7.7mm and weighing in at meagre 558grams the AT200 is a highly portable product and one that will be very popular with anyone on the go particularly if Toshiba prices it competitively. The tablet runs Android Honeycomb version 3.2 which is great as far as an operating system is concerned, the drawback is that unlike Apple’s strict App Store quality control, Android’s open source format attracts many more bad apps as there are good ones and with over 250,000 to choose from you’ll be doing a lot of sifting. The spec however is impressive. There’s a front and back HD camera and a micro HDMI port to hook it up to the telly, a 10.1inch capacitive LED screen, GPS, wifi, Bluetooth, 1 gig of DDR2 RAM and a 1.2 ghz TI OMAP 4430 CPU. The current model has 16 and 32 gig versions, but a 64 gig model and 3G is promised early next year. So, thin is good. It’s good because the battery life is certainly not starved, you get a full eight hours and it’ll pop inside your case with a minimum of fuss. Whether or not it stacks up against the Galaxy will have to be seen. At the end of the day it will be the price that will determine that one.