Hands on: Toshiba AT200 is world’s thinnest tablet

Toshiba unveiled its latest tablet, the AT200, today at IFA. The standout specification is certainly its thickness, a world-beating 7.7mm, just skimming in under Samsung’s 7.89mm on its Galaxy Tab 7.7 – announced earlier today. The two shouldn’t really be compared directly though as Toshiba’s tablet is a more typical 10.1in design.

The super-slender tablet certainly doesn;t feel fragile due to its design, though the hands-on units were locked into security cases, so we couldn’t give them a good flex. It weighs just 558g, making it very light, some 41g lighter than the equivalent Galaxy Tab 10.1.

The 10.1in display on the engineering model we saw was bright and crisp, and Toshiba spokespeople confirmed it was an IPS panel with a 1,280×800 resolution. It’s impossible to say if this will be replicated on retail models of course.

Inside the tablet Toshiba has used a Texas Instruments integrated chipset, rather than the usual Qualcomm- or Nvidia Tegra-based offerings, with a dual-core CPU running at 1.2GHz. Android 3.2 felt responsive on this hardware, but we’d be keen to see how it perfroms in our benchmarks and how well it performs in 3D applications and HD media playback

Unlike some offerings, and despite its slim dimensions, the AT200 is well equipped. You have plenty of ports – there’s the usual micro-USB, plus a micro-HDMI port for video playback on a larger display, plus a micro-SD slot for accessing external storage. In addition, there’s two cameras with 5-megapixels on the back and 2-megapixels front-facing.

It’s an impressive device, and depending on that Texas Instruments chipset, it could take Toshiba from nowhere to amongst the leaders in the hotly contested Android tablet war.