And we’re off… as the clock struck midnight in Las Vegas for the beginning of CES week, Toshiba unveiled the first of many tablet devices expected to be shown at the Consumer Electronics show.
The Toshiba Tablet is the first aimed at the US market by Toshiba and looks an advance on the Folio tablet it introduced in Europe towards the end of last year, which I saw unveiled at the IFA show in Berlin.
Working units will be on display at CES this week and an early version I was shown in San Francisco had a 10.1-inch multi-touch LED display with a high-resolution screen at 1280 x 800 (720p), which allows a full web page to be framed more readily in portrait mode.
This makes it a bigger, wider screen than the iPad and Toshiba has thrown in two stereo speakers and is powering it with Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip to make it a powerful multimedia machine.
There are two cameras – a 2Mp front-facing one and 5Mp rear-facing – a removable battery, SD card slot, standard and mini-USB ports and an HDMI port for playing video on a larger screen. Inside is Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11n connectivity as well as a GPS chip.
Toshiba says the tablet will be available in the first half of 2011 and it is waiting for Google to release the next version of Android, codenamed Honeycomb, which is being designed with tablets in mind.
The Japanese company will add its own services to the Android experience – the Toshiba Places app marketplace for games, movies and music and the BookPlace eReader.
So in summary, the Tablet is a classy,powerful device, an improvement on the Folio and beats the iPad in its screen capabilities and connectivity. However, by the time it appears, Apple will probably have released an improved iPad 2.
Toshiba also showed me a number of new notebooks and netbooks in advance of CES and I was most impressed by one with a 3D display. This did not require glasses and it maintained the 3D effect wherever I positioned myself.
This was done by using the webcam embedded above the screen to track constantly the position of my eyes.
At present, the laptop is just a demonstration of Toshiba’s technology and there is no date for the release of such a machine.
