Toshiba AT200 Excite At only 7.7mm thick, Toshiba boasts that its new tablet is the slimmest yet and it’s a claim I can’t argue with either. Dubbed the Excite in the US and the rather less exciting AT200 elsewhere, Tosh's slim slab is 0.9mm thinner than the previous title holder, the Samsung Galaxy 10.1. While the Apple iPad 2 seems positively …
I've had this tablet for several months, though the Japanese branding is AT 700. I'm mostly quite satisfied and could provide detailed comments, but my main reaction to the review is that the reviewer has destroyed his credibility with his favorable references to ASUS. It's possible I just had bad luck, but my experience with an ASUS tablet was incredibly negative, and it was at the ASUS end, mostly their so-called support via their website that completely destroyed any value in their specifications.
As regards my AT 200, I mostly use it for email (with voice input), Internet radio (where the speakers are as important as his review suggested), some Web browsing, and some Japanese study games. Overall I'm pretty satisfied with it, but I don't feel like it's as 'mature' as the iPad. If Toshiba is sincere, I think they can push into the market, but it's going to be a tough fight and I wouldn't want to bet on any of the Android horses yet.
you think the reviewer should modify his opinions because you have had one bad experience with ASUS' customer support in a country on the other side of the planet (Japan)?
I don't know if the reviewer owns an Asus tablet or has just used them for review but I do (a Transformer Prime) and it's worked pretty perfectly from day one including the ICS update. OK, the GPS lock being a bit wobbly but I never us the GPS radio so that's no loss to me.
So you've had a bad experience with ASUS and HTC customer support, get over it and for the love of God quit repeating the story.
Judging a technology company by it's support is like judging a restaurant by it's service. Both will vary immensely depending on who you're dealing with and what kind of day they've had. It's the device and software (or food) that you're after. As a one-man IT department in the SMB space I've had good and bad experiences with any manufacturer you'd like to come up with. In our office with have about a dozen Transformer TF101s and 2 Primes (for the execs). ICS runs flawlessly on all of them, built in VPN is transparent to the user, and I get to apply chrome group policy to every device and desktop at once. I was impressed enough with the TF101 I bought one myself. My non-techie wife liked it so much she went out and got an ASUS laptop. That too works great.
At work we also have a few iPads and one iPad2, but they pretty much just sit in the cabinet. They can't run our custom in-house apps and are basically only useful as toys in the break room. You are right to suggest that Honeycomb is an immature OS, even Google has admitted as much, but don't lump ASUS in with Toshiba's clearly colossal failure.
No ICS and poor build quality - and they want to sell this against the other Android tablets or an iPad 2 / 3 - it's not even as good as an iPad 2 'was' so what hope have they trying to flog a less well made tablet against the iPad 3 for the same cash...? Sure to some it must be Android - but there are better available.
The miniscule thinness doesn't make it any different from the rest.
The current "best" Android tablet is obviously the Asus Transformer Prime, with its good specs, brilliant (in every sense of the word) screen, the keyboard and its battery (and connectivity) advantages.
Samsung's phletora of TAB devices come second, as the most "ipad-like" devices - slim, well built and devoid of real connectivity. I don't like the look of TouchWiz though, but maybe that's just me.
Even Sony tried something different with its coffee-table design, and its universal remote thing (infrared). If I was picking between Tegra 2 devices (and had passed over the original Asus Transformer for some reason), I'd pick this one. I'm shallow, I like the different folded magazine kind of design.
This Toshiba may be OK, but it doesn't have anything different going for it. No signature, no endearing quirk, no nothing. Boring, forgettable.
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