The first thing you’ll notice about the AT100 is that it’s a little chunky. At 273mm x 177mm x 16mm, it’s almost twice as thick as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and it weighs a beefy 725g.
Still, such things can be forgiven if the features are right. The question is: are they?
Hardware
The hardware in the AT100 is very similar to that of other Honeycomb slates. There’s an NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC with a 1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage space (upgradable up to an additional 32GB via the SD card slot).
AnTuTu benchmarks gave the AT100 a score of 4726.8, placing it above the Motorola Xoom, but below the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the ASUS Transformer.
The screen is a Toshiba TruBrite TFT high brightness display with a resolution of 1280×800.
Connectivity-wise, the AT100 supports WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, and it also has full HDMI and USB ports along with a mini-USB port.
For the photo-lovers, there’s a 5 megapixel rear- and a 2 megapixel front camera.
Design and build quality
The back cover is a rubberised plastic with diagonal striping. It doesn’t look or feel particularly rugged, nor does it feel cheap.
The rubber finish and the texturing does make it easy to hold and handle with one hand without fear of it leaping from your grasp.
There’s a Toshiba logo in the middle, while the camera sits at the top (in portrait orientation). The camera is surrounded by chromed plastic that makes it stick out and looks wholly inelegant.
The back cover can come off to grant access to the battery and it does so relatively easily, without fear of snapping things into little pieces.
The top of the AT100 (in portrait orientation) holds only the lock switch for the back cover.
The bottom holds the charging connector and 3.5mm audio jack, as well as the USB, HDMI, and mini-USB connectors – the latter three are covered by a flap.Why Toshiba chose mini-USB over micro-USB isn’t clear, and I had to dig deep in my drawers to find a compatible cable seeing as the AT100 didn’t come with one in the box.
The left of the device only holds the dock connector (sold separately), while the right plays host to the power button, volume rocker, and orientation lock switch.
The front of the device is basically all screen, with a little space at the top for the camera, again surrounded by chromed plastic spoiling the uniformity (though perhaps it will protect against lawsuits from Apple).
Along the right edge are three LEDs to indicate power, low/charged battery and whether the wireless is connected.
The power LED pulses when in sleep mode and stays lit when the screen is on. The former proved distracting, making me think there were missed notifications when there weren’t, and the latter is just plain useless – as if I’d notice a tiny LED over the 10-inch screen that is obviously on.
It’s easy enough to forgive the incongruous aesthetics in light of the good practical decisions. The mini-USB port is a bit of a puzzler, but the full USB port more than makes up for it.
Screen and responsiveness
The screen offers a resolution of 1280×800 – the same as other Honeycomb tablet PC reviewed so far.
It allows up to four touch points at a time, which doesn’t compare very well to the 10 touch points offered by the Motorola Xoom, ASUS Transformer, and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, though in use it made little difference.
Reading and watching videos was comfortable, though as with the Motorola Xoom, colours tended to be a bit more yellow.
It’s marketed as a “TruBrite” display, but to my eyes it appeared to be the least bright when compared to the Transformer and Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Browsing, typing notes and messages, and gaming were smooth and responsive.
One area of concern, as mentioned in our Motorola Xoom review, is that when you turn the AT100 into portrait mode or upside down, the UI starts to stutter.
Considering that the cameras seem to indicate that it’s supposed to be used in portrait mode, at least in part, this is a bigger deal than before and needs to be taken note of.
Sound quality
The sound quality on the AT100 wasn’t particularly great.
It was loud enough, though it was fairly tinny even with the sound enhancements switched on.
Investing in a decent set of ear- or headphones is definitely not a bad idea
Cameras
Picture quality for both the front and the back camera was average – nothing particularly outstanding and nothing terrible. Video capture left quite a bit to be desired, as there was a lot of artifacting even in well-lit areas.
The worst part here is the actual placement of the rear-camera: it’s exactly where you would want to place your hand if holding it in landscape orientation. One solution is to just hold it in portrait mode, except the default camera application doesn’t support that orientation.
It’s still usable like that, but the system bar will be along the side instead of at the bottom where it’s supposed to be. This is an oversight by Google (it’s the default Honeycomb camera app) made worse by Toshiba.
Battery life
In regular use involving some browsing, reading, watching a video or two, and playing some Angry Birds, I managed to get around two days of battery life.
In a looping video test where brightness was set to around 65% and WiFi left on, the AT100 only lasted about 6 hours, placing it below the ASUS Transformer and Motorola Xoom.Software
Toshiba has seen fit to pre-load the AT100 with quite a few apps, some useful, others less so.
The first is ThinkFree Office mobile, which gives you a way to create and edit documents and spreadsheets.
Whether or not you want to create documents or spreadsheets from scratch on a tablet PC is a question each person needs to answer themselves, but it is nice to have a way to view and make changes to existing documents.
Evernote also comes pre-loaded, though it is an older version. A quick update from the Android Market will get you a version more suited to tablet PCs, after which you can take notes with abandon.
The default file manager (aptly named “File Manager”) is definitely one of the better ones, and allows you to browse, cut, copy, paste files on both internal storage and external sources. Transferring files to and from a flash drive was a breeze and it’s great to have that functionality for larger files.
PrinterShare is also quite useful, allowing you to connect to nearby printers and print from them wirelessly.
There’s a trial version of McAfee WaveSecure which can thankfully be uninstalled. Launching it once and exiting before registering resulted in notifications popping up constantly reminding me to register.
There’s an eBay app that isn’t actually an app, it’s just a shortcut to the website. Unfortunately, this is not removable, so you’ll just have to keep it in your app drawer.
Toshiba has also included their own “Toshiba Places” app which has to be useful for something, but I honestly can’t figure out what that is.
Lastly, there’s TuneWiki. As with Evernote, TuneWiki requires an update from the Market. It also still has ads even though it came preloaded on the device.This ends the discussion on what some would call bloat-ware and others would call crap-ware. Some of it is actually useful, and the ones that aren’t useful are sometimes actively disturbing.
This is hardly the end of it though. There are bigger problems more related with the underlying operating system (OS).
Sometimes, when coming out of sleep mode, it takes a few seconds for the lock screen to appear. This isn’t too bad, but it means that you have to wait for the device to catch up with you before you’ve even started doing anything.
Other times, the AT100 simply doesn’t wake from sleep mode and either reboots by itself, or requires that you switch it off and on again.
The coup de grâce is that the AT100 sometimes reboots all by itself. It doesn’t seem to be triggered by one specific event: the screen can be on or off; you can be using it or may have just finished using it.
The best part of this is that when the device reboots, it’s usable for a few minutes afterward and then it reboots again, and again. The only way (I could find) to remedy the situation is to turn it off and on again.
These fairly large bugs are reminiscent of days long gone and speak of software that was not fully tested before shipping. In short, it feels like Toshiba has shipped beta-quality software to paying customers, which is just not right.
Conclusion
The Toshiba AT100 is clear proof that specs aren’t everything. The full USB- and HDMI ports along with some solid internals made it look like a good contender in the tablet PC race, but mediocre battery life and downright bad software makes it fall very short.
4:24 PM
my phone
