Today so called netbooks ship with Windows XP or 7 installed nd have big hard drives. Actually they are just smaller notebooks.The Toshiba AC100 goes back to the original idea of netbooks. It only comes with 5GB of hard drive (probably flash) uses smartphone hardware to be ultra small and have good battery life. And what could be better then putting Android as operating system?
Toshiba used version 2.1 and it works surprisingly well. The device is a normal netbook, Android was designed for touch devices. For navigation you have a normal mouse cursor, the normal touch is mapped to left mouse key, the menu-key as right mouse key (comparably to Windows context menus) and the Windows-key is replaced by the home-screen buttong. A typical Microsoft user has to forget about double clicking and the long click is sometimes a pain. But most of the time the device is a lot of fun.
The device ships with email app, browsers (Opera Mini or Google) an office suite (Docs2Go), a file explorer what do you need more?
Sadly it does not have a marketplace yet, it uses an own appstore called Camangi which is still very limited. But you simply can download any apk file via the browser.
The device itself feels pretty good for cheap plastic and looks much nicer as some of the more expensive variants.
It supports 3G via any SIMCard (inserted behind the battery) or any wifi network. The battery should work for 8 hours, thats at least what the manufacturer is telling. It needs some seconds to get out of sleep mode but it's still acceptable and you normally don't have to shut it down.
With 379€ it's still a little expensive, I could by a Windows netbooks for nearly this price but.
But I would recommend it and maybe I'll use it on my next trip instead of carrying my Windows convertable.
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