Toshiba AT300 review

Weighing in at a comparatively light 590g, the Toshiba AT300 is comfortable to hold and its textured aluminium rear cover helps provide additional grip. Build quality is acceptable but not up to iPad standards; it flexes noticeably if you apply pressure towards the edge of screen, and the slightly raised outer edge will give students something to pick away at.

The 10.1in 1,280 x 800 screen offers decent viewing angles and deep colours, and text is crisp and easy to read. The Gorilla Glass offers scratch resistance, which should help when the AT300 is being passed round a classroom.

It’s a well-connected tablet, with a headphone socket, a micro-HDMI port, a micro-USB socket and a full-size SD card slot. The AT300 has a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera along with a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, but image quality from both is below what you get from a decent smartphone.

Toshiba offers the AT300 with either 16 or 32GB of storage. Our 32GB review sample came with 27.3GB of free capacity, but the 16GB model will save you around £50, and the SD card slot can be used to increase capacity later on.

The AT300 runs on an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor running at 1.3GHz, and with 1GB of RAM this tablet has the power to run even the most demanding Android apps. Battery life is less impressive, with 8hrs 13mins in our stringent tests.

The AT300 comes with Android 4.0 pre-installed, which Toshiba has largely left alone. However, the stock keyboard has been swapped for the popular Swype keyboard, where you swipe your finger from letter to letter instead of typing, lifting it only between words. Once you’ve become used to it, this works extremely well. The ThinkFree Office suite is also included, providing word processor, spreadsheet and presentation apps for your productivity needs.

Toshiba has served up a real contender with the AT300. Build quality puts it slightly behind the very best, but otherwise it offers everything a typical school needs at a fantastic price.

Author: Jamie Stephens