Toshiba AT200 review

The tablet market is maturing nicely, with Apple’s mighty iPad secure at the top of the hill, and a host of more affordable, but perfectly competent Android tablets gathered on the lower slopes. The latest addition to that growing crowd is the Toshiba AT200 – a tablet running Android 3.2 (with an update to 4 promised in the near future) – with a 10.1in 1,280 x 800 display and 16GB or 32GB of storage.

If those specifications make it sound so-so, it’s anything but in the flesh. In fact, the marketing and sales photos we saw before laying our hands on one just don’t do it justice. This tablet looks great: the rear is tastefully finished in a grey, brushed-aluminium, and a thin smoked-chrome inlay around the edge lends it a sophisticated look.

And it’s as slim and light as they come, measuring 7.8mm from front to back and weighing 508g. That’s lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (565g), the iPad (652g) and the Motorola Xoom 2 (599g). Toshiba claims it’s the world’s thinnest tablet and we wouldn’t disagree.

In terms of specification, it’s a little less cutting-edge. Under the screen lives a dual-core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430 processor – which is slower than the Archos 101 G9 – and this is complemented by 1GB of RAM and PowerVR SGX540 graphics. There’s a decent supply of ports and sockets, with a 3.5mm headphone jack on the left edge next to a micro-HDMI output, microSD slot and micro-USB connection, but no SIM slot for 3G connection.

Despite the slightly slower specification, performance during testing was fine. Angry Birds Space stuttered a little, but the demanding Shadowgun and Reckless Racing played with hardly a hitch. The AT200 completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 2,108ms – behind the likes of the quad-core Asus Transformer Prime, but still acceptable.