Toshiba AT300 Replacing Slimness with Quad-core Performance

When Toshiba released the AT200 it was the proclaimed to be one of the slimmest tablets available.  Now that they are giving it an upgrade as the AT300 the slimness has gone and the power is being added, but at a budget.  Pushing into the battle for budget domination with tablets like the Google Nexus 7 it looks to be providing some welcome competition.

Priced around the mid –range tablet market this is not a budget per say, but still cheap enough to be of competition.  It won’t compete with the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity or Apple iPad but it will give plenty of competition at a price people will notice.

Build

The pad is not made to be slick or fashionable, but it’s adequate.  Mostly plastic in design but for a Gorilla Glass front it won’t win any competitions in the beauty front.  It’s around 8.5mm thick and weighs around 590g which puts it at a smaller size than the iPad 3 but it’s not the thinnest or lightest of the pads on the market, this includes its younger brother the AT200.

Screen

As mentioned in the build section the front of the AT3000 includes Gorilla Glass which makes it tough and sturdy and suitable for most uses.  The resolution is 1,280 x 800 and is around 10.1 inches which is an average size of screen.  The colours are rich and with an above average contrast it’s ok for indoor use, it does seem to catch the sun a lot though with outside use.  Finger marks can also be an issue too which can be annoying.

Operating System and Software

The AT300 runs on Ice Cream Sandwich which is normal for all of the new tablets now, soon we’ll be looking towards this changing to Jelly Bean of course.  With the quad core processor in the tablet everything is slick and fast as is expected and there are no real performance issues with normal use.  This could actually be its more standout feature.

Toshiba has pre-installed plenty of apps onto the AT300 for the user with McAfee Security, office software, Toshiba Places and a few other apps to increase your enjoyment of the Pad (or Toshiba’s view of what you will enjoy).  These have some uses but with some you probably won’t get much use out of them; it is nice to have them though.

On the media side there are plenty of ways to get your songs, films and TV shows on there to enjoy through USB and SD Card reader.  A HDMI connection also provides the ability to connect the tablet to your other home entertainment devices if required.  There is even a headphone jack for private listening if required.

Performance

The quad-core processor in the AT300 is a 1.3GHZ Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU and comes with 1GB of RAM to back it up, this means there is plenty of power to run anything you want to, this includes games which can be bought from Google Play.  There is a 5-megapixel camera included which takes the expected quality of tablet pictures.  The front camera (2-megapixel) is adequate for video chatting, so nothing stand out on the camera department, just what is expected.

Verdict

With a battery that gives around 10 hours of video playback, 36 hours audio and 168 hours standby you will get plenty of constant use out of it through the day.  The more use though, especially on processor heavy apps the quicker it will go down, for example constant games and HD video will probably take it down to 6 hours.

As a mid-range tablet the Toshiba AT300 has no stand out features that make it noticeably better than any of its competitors, but what it does promise is slick performance where it is needed and plenty of apps pre-installed for you to play with.  When it comes down to choice it will be down to which you personally feel like buying, but one thing that there is no worries about is that this tablet has plenty to offer, just like its competitors.

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