Five or six years ago when the web started to become popular, hardware manufacturers promised lightweight slates for browsing the web far more cheaply than laptops.
In those days ‘far more cheaply’ meant £6-700, lightweight meant chunky and browsing the web wasn’t that exciting.
Now the web is indispensible – and a lot more powerful; cheap means netbook or smartphone prices and hardware is more powerful and much smaller. The 7-inch JournE Tablet is thin and light, it costs €249 (£220) – but is it more than a web pad?
Although Toshiba believes it will appeal to a very different market from the abortive Crunchpad (and the Joo Joo replacement), the interest in the Crunchpad and the endless speculation about an Apple tablet is a mixed blessing for the JournE.
The Crunchpad was supposed to be a cheap and simple web tablet, but many users want iPhone-style apps on a larger screen as well as web browsing. Slim down the OS and lose the keyboard and you get a smaller, lighter machine like this – but will it do enough for you to want it?
We take a look at the first version – on sale any day now.
Toshiba’s JournE Touch is a 7-inch touchscreen with an ARM 11 processor driving the latest version of Windows CE (CE 6.0 R3) and it starts up in ten seconds.
It has b and g Wi-Fi, but not n (to keep the price down – a comment that we found ourselves making more than once) and we found both speed and reception inferior to a notebook on the same network.
There’s a speaker on the back, concealed in the textured grip and a headphone socket on the side.
There are two USB ports; one standard and one mini USB, so you can connect it to your PC to copy files across, plug in a memory stick full of music, photos or videos to supplement the 1GB of on-board flash or connect a wireless broadband dongle to get online.
There’s no accelerometer and the screen doesn’t rotate (automatically or manually – although some apps will be able to rotate the screen).
The interface is very simple; there are icons for every app, with help and settings tucked away at the end of the list.
Tap in the corner to choose a wireless network to connect to; the other corner shows the current time and battery level, with an icon for opening the keyboard (although it usually opens automatically when you can type something into a field).
Currently there’s a limited list of apps, most of them online tools. Some are familiar: YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Picasa. Others are less well known; Radeo, a streaming radio service and FrameChannel, a content aggregation service.
There’s an RSS reader, and MSN Messenger for instant messaging and voice calls to other Messenger users – easy to use, with the limitations of the on-screen keyboard. You can play MP3 and WMA tracks (with or without DRM); the interface for music, video and photos is the same icon-based folder navigation with simple forward/back and play/pause controls.
The Weather Channel app is basically a weather widget. There’s a simple calendar app where you can create reminders, but this doesn’t link to any internet calendars, and a ‘fridge door’ for leaving messages on – this lets you type notes or record rather muffled voice messages, but it would be much better if you could draw or write in the notes.
Screen resolution of the Toshiba JournE is 800×480; so even though it supports MPEG 4 as well as H.264, you can’t watch HD.
However, it is good for YouTube and similar services. There’s an optional cradle with an HDMI port for plugging it into your PC, which will be one of the simplest ways we’ve seen of getting YouTube and internet content on your big screen.
