Toshiba announces JournE touch tablet running Windows CE
Windows CE. Windows CE. Windows CE. Really, Toshiba? Really?
It’s not that Windows CE doesn’t have its place. It’s that that place is the supermarket cash register. But by releasing your new multimedia touch tablet, the JournE, and powering it with Windows CE 6.0, Toshiba, you have given the world an odd and almost profane creation. It’s like scooping out the brain of some gasping Cenozoic mudskipper and grafting it into the body of, oh, let’s say, a giant transforming robot. It just somehow doesn’t seem up to the task.
At first blush, though, the Toshiba JournE does look up to the task of light multi-media playback and internet browsing. The JournE Touch is a 7 inch touch tablet touted for living room use. The TFT touchscreen display comes with LED backlight and a resolution of 800 x 480, making it a 16 to 9 aspect ratio affair, with a contrast ration of 300 to 1. WiFi connectivity, an SDHC memory card slot, HDMI output, USB capability and a paltry 1GB of flash memory round out the unit’s specs.
The software does not look expandable, but for a certain user, will doubtlessly prove sufficient. The included browser is positively archaic — Internet Explorer Six, for heaven’s sake — but it supports a wide range of social networks like YouTube, Acetrax, Picasa, Flickr, MSN Messenger and Others. Windows Multimedia Player 9.0 will handle the playback of a wide variety of file formats.
Still, it’s that Windows CE 6.0 operating system that looks like the weak link. The Toshiba JournE might be an interesting novelty buy for casual users, but for power users, it’s going to be a hard sell, unless the currently unknown price is low enough for an impulse buy. Surely something more robust would have been a better choice: Android, perhaps?
- By John Brownlee | Geek.com
- Naiomi Solomon
Related Posts
No related posts.
