Toshiba Android Honeycomb tablet and glasses-free 3D laptop hands-on
Toshiba's latest Android tablet and a glasses-free 3D laptop will be on show at CES, but our American comrades have already manhandled them. Here's what they think.
Toshiba will showcase its second Android-flavoured tablet at tech tradeshow CES, which kicks off on Thursday. The company will also show off a glasses-free 3D laptop. Our much-loved cousins at CNET.com have already manhandled both.
The unnamed successor to the Folio 100 tablet will run Android Honeycomb, an upcoming version of Google's mobile operating system. The device will, like Apple's iPad, have a capacitive touchscreen, with multi-touch support and an accelerometer, for automatically adjusting the screen's orientation.
Otherwise, Toshiba's tablet is looking to duff the iPad up good and proper. For a start, it has a larger, 10.1-inch display, compared to the iPad's 9.7-inch screen. The display has a slightly higher resolution than the iPad's too -- 1,280x800 pixels, compared to 1,024x768 pixels.
It will also pack a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, which could make for speedier performance, as well as Flash support and an HDMI output for 1080p video playback on a TV. A 2-megapixel camera on the front and a 5-megapixel camera on the back are other features that the iPad lacks.
Among the remaining specs are USB and mini-USB ports, an SD card slot for memory expansion, and support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. The tablet will also pack a removable battery. The amount of built-in storage and 3G capability are yet to be confirmed.
Our US colleague Donald Bell was impressed by the hardware, although he couldn't test the software. Apparently, Toshiba's latest offering feels slicker than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and more rugged than the iPad. He points out that it's bulkier than both, though, weighing a porky 770g to the iPad's 725g.
Toshiba's glasses-free 3D laptop also impressed CNET.com's Scott Stein. Using similar technology to Nintendo's 3DS, the Qosmio laptop delivered convincing depth effects when playing back Avatar, although the video quality suffered, and wasn't as good as you'd get with a 3D Blu-ray. Overall, it sounds like an impressive, if not quite perfect, technology.
Click here to see the Toshiba tablet from all angles, and here for more details on the 3D laptop. We'll have pricing and availability details as soon as we get our sweaty mitts on them.