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The Acer Iconia Tab A500 isn’t the only Android tablet headed to Best Buy stores in the near future. The company has also put up a “coming soon” page for the Toshiba Tablet. For some reason the company hasn’t been able to come up with a better name for its upcoming Android tablet than that, even though Toshiba has been showing off the device since early January.
The Toshiba Tablet features all the usual top-of-the-line Android tablet specs including a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor, 10.1 inch. 1280 x 800 pixel display, and Google Android 3.0.
The tablet also features HDMI output, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, USB ports, and front and rear cameras.
The Toshiba Tablet does have a few features which help set it apart from the crowd, including a full sized SD card slot, a user replaceable battery, and a rubberized rear panel which makes the tablet easier to grip.
Best Buy hasn’t announced a price or exact release date yet. There’s also a coming soon page at Amazon
via Android Central
By placing the camera in teh center of one of the four cardinal directions, they make it easier to line up shots. You line up the object in the center of the unit and hit a button. An offset camera means you can’t line up the shot as intuitively.
This tablet has a lot going for it but I don’t think Toshiba knows if it’s to be used primarily in landscape mode or not. . . horrible placement of the camera.
It’s got the ports we all want, user changeable battery. . . now if it just had a dock like the Asus Transformer it would be the near perfect tablet.
Why is it, no company can put it all together? One makes a great dock, one makes a thin light tablet, on makes a tablet with all the ports, etc. . .
Seriously, don’t we have some basic standards from PCs at this point?
There’s a few reasons why manufacturers don’t make one
“perfect” tablet/slate.
1. This is a relatively new product category. Even though the
computer business has some of the best and brightest minds in
history, device makers haven’t been at this very long. Still, you
must agree the the pace of innovation has been nothing short of
remarkable. I mean, can you think of any other industry where
innovation has come so quickly? And remember, all this has come
with falling prices to boot. Name me another industry where prices can fall as much as 20-30% a year, yet still offer
outstanding customer value. Perhaps we are all getting a bit
spoiled? (Btw, consider other industries whose prices have been
stagnant or falling, such as the airline industry–until recently,
or tire manufacturing, and see how little innovation and consumer
benefit there is in these areas.)
2. People’s tastes constantly change. I used to introduce
innovations to people who were not technically savvy. They often
told me that they didn’t know what they wanted, but that they
could tell, when presented with something, whether they liked it
or not. Consider the tale of the elephant and the blind men, each
of whom had his misconception of what the elephant was. Also,
the need for smaller, better, faster necessitates changing specs.
Having worked in the business and shepherded new products, I’ve
seen first hand how difficult and challenging the process is.
3. Manufacturers need you to keep buying products to stay in
business. So they naturally can’t afford to put the kitchen sink
in their offerings. Even if they did try to put the kitchen sink in,
they have to meet cost, component availability, and marketing
deadlines. So inevitably, features don’t make it to version 1, and
get shuffled off to version 2, and so on. We already hear of
component shortages caused by Apple’s soaring sales of the iPad 2
(some 2.5 million sold so far) that are wreaking havoc with RIM’s
Playbook product release.
4. Finally, although I mentioned about how smart the people in
this business are, it’s a really tough, competitive business, and
very few people or companies get things satisfactorily. Even fewer companies do it consistently. What’s worse is that technological
innovation often brings about paradigm change. Think of the
automobile’s introduction putting horse-drawn carriage makers out
of business. So it isn’t surprising Apple has wrested the mantle of
media device leadership from Sony, or Google taking over smartphone operating system dominance from Symbian and Microsoft. Or Intel playing second fiddle to ARM.