Toshiba JournE tablet

Toshiba is making it known that the company ha s no intention of sitting out the tablet PC revolution. You know, if it actually turns out to be a revolution.

Netbooks began to take the world by storm when Asus introduced a consumer oriented low cost mini-laptop in late 2007. It took half a year for HP to introduce the first real competitor for the Eee PC 701, and another few months before the rest of the PC industry really caught up.

Things are moving very differently in the tablet space. Everybody has their eye on the upcoming Apple iPad, but HP, Asus, MSI, Lenovo, and other PC makers have already announced plans to launch their own slates. And now we can add Toshiba to the lineup.

A Toshiba exec tells Fortune Magazine that it will bring out a whole line of slate devices later this year or early next year. No word on what kind of tablets we’re talking about. They could be Windows tablets with x86 processors, or ARM-based tablets running Linux, Google Android, Chrome, or another OS. Or maybe all of the above.

Make sure to check out the Fortune article for a good overall look at the tablet landscape. The Toshiba revelation is just a small part of the article.

via Engadget

Credit: Laptop Magazine

While Intel is without question the dominant chip-maker in the netbook space thanks to its low power Atom chips, the company has a little more competition in the budget thin and light laptop space. Basically these are laptops with 11 to 14 inch displays. They tend to weigh less than 4 pounds, and companies including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and toshiba all offer models which fall into this category, many with starting prices around $500 or less.

While Intel’s CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) line of processors are pretty popular in this space, AMD also offers a line of budget, low power Neo chips.

It’s typically hard to do an apples to apples comparison of a laptop by pitting a laptop with an AMD CPU against one with an Intel chipset… because other hardware tends to vary from system to system. So, for example, it’s hardly fair to compare a Lenovo X100e with an AMD Neo processor to an Asus UL20A with an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 CPU because the machines have completely different hardware.

But Toshiba offers two versions of the 13 inchВ  Satellite T135 — one with an AMD chipset and the other with Intel hardware. A far as I can tell, most of the other specs are pretty similar. And that’s why Laptop Magazine’s comparison of the Toshiba Satellite T135 and the T135D was so interesting. The T135 has a 1.3GHz Pentium SU4100 dual core CPU and GMA 4500MHD graphics while the T135D has an AMD Neo X2 L625 dual core processor and ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics.

You can find a detailed explanation of the differences between these two systems at Laptop Magazine. But here’s the short version: The Intel version gets about 2 hours of extra battery life, while the AMD version scores higher in graphics tests and in some CPU tests. For day to day use, both laptops are powerful enough for web surfing, watching HD video, or casual gaming. But if you plan to do video editing or other CPU-intensive tasks, the AMD version might be a better bet. If you want all-day computing, the Intel model appears to have the edge.

Of course, this test really only applies to these particular computer models. Intel has other versions of its CULV processors, and AMD has other versions of its low power Neo chips. And they may interact differently with different hardware. But as a general rule, Laptop’s results seem to bear out things I’ve read elsewhere which indicate that AMD’s strength is performance while Intel’s is energy consumption.