Toshiba tries anew with 10.1-inch Android tablet

BERLIN–Toshiba, trying again to gain a foothold in the
tablet market, introduced the AT200
Android tablet today, a Honeycomb-powered model with a 10.1-inch screen.















The tablet, like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, has a screen resolution of 1280×800. It’s 7.7mm thick and the Wi-Fi-only model weighs 558 grams–measurements Toshiba is very excited about as a sales pitch.
“People like thin and light,” said Steve Crawley, Toshiba’s senior manager for tablet product development, at the IFA electronics show here. Toshiba boasts that’s the thinnest and lightest for a tablet in its screen size.

Andy Bass, Toshiba’s vice president of sales and marketing in Europe, shows the AT200 Android tablet.

The tablet has a dual-core TI OMAP 4430 processor running at 1.2GHz; an LED-backlit LCD display; a battery good for eight hours of video; ports for MicroSD cards, HDMI video, and USB; a gyroscope, accelerometer, and electronic compass; a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with LED flash and 2-megapixel front-facing camera; stereo speakers; 1GB of memory; 256mm by 176mm by 7.7mm dimensions; and Wi-Fi supporting 802.11b/g/n. It’s got Adobe Systems’ Flash Player 10.3, convenient for the BBC iPlayer crowd, and Toshiba’s media player software.
It’ll ship in the fourth quarter, Crawley said. The tablet will arrive with version 3.2 of Google’s tablet operating system, aka Honeycomb, but Toshiba is committed to an over-the-air update to its successor, Ice Cream Sandwich, he added.
The Android tablet market is a tough one, though. Strong players such as Samsung haven’t made much headway against


Apple’s iPad dominance, and it’s tough for Android device makers to stand out from the crowd.
“If you’re all going Android some people will have their work cut out to distinguish the product,” Crawley said. Toshiba believes it can with the AT200, its third-generation tablet. In addition to the thin-and-light argument, the company will emphasize sound features, such as the ability to adjust sound according to best fit the conditions where the tablet is located, and video features, such as Resolution+ upscaling technology to improve low-resolution video.


Crawley believes that Android tablet software is “getting better all the time,” though. “We are very happy with the market and how it’s developing.”

Toshiba also thinks it’s in a better position now than it was during earlier tablet attempts such as the AT100. Asked what the company learned from those, Crawley replied, “What didn’t we learn? To be first on the market was a very difficult trick. We learned how to talk to Google better, to tailor our product more.”