Toshiba AC100 Review

By Peter Cartwright
Posted 6 Sep, 2010 4:22 pm

Review Summary

The Toshiba AC100 gives us a taste of what to expect from smartbooks – super slim and light with battery life to spare but fails to deliver on some other expected features and things we take for granted. It is clearly not ready for mass consumption; The OS gives a very poor experience in a laptop form factor and is unstable and a hardware issue dashes hopes of long battery life with instant on functionality. Unless you want to tinker with Nvidia Tegra 2 hardware, avoid currently.

Pros

• Superior weight and size
• Silent
• Low heat
• Robust, ideal for mobility (no moving parts)
• Superior battery life
• Comfortable keyboard

Cons

• Android 2.1 in this form factor is not fit for consumers (unusable for any type of work)
• Poor selection of apps out there, esp for this form factor.
• No Flash support
• Hardware issue – massive battery drain
• Glossy screen + low-ish brightness, hard to see outdoors
• Speakers distort, reverberate at high volume

Photo Gallery

There’s my iPhone 4 and aging Samsung N140 netbook thrown in there for size comparison.