To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
The Toshiba AT300SE is a 10in tablet with a 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage space. It’s lightweight and comfortable to hold in both hands, being 10.5mm thick and made mainly from plastic. At 625g, it weighs less than an iPad, but this should come as no surprise given the choice of materials. The textured finish on the rear of the tablet provides a good level of grip, but there’s noticeable flex when you apply pressure to it.
The Toshiba AT300SE has few connection ports, having just a 3.5mm headphone jack, MicroSD card slot and Micro USB port on its left-hand side. There’s no video output, so you’re stuck with the 10.1in display for videos and games.
With its maximum resolution of 1,280×800, the AT300SE has a fairly unremarkable screen. It’s sharp enough for general web browsing, but we prefer the higher resolution screen of the Google Nexus 10. It’s reasonably bright as long as Auto Brightness is disabled, and it has above average viewing angles thanks to its IPS panel, but its overly glossy finish makes it difficult to see anything in direct sunlight or under indoor lighting. We’re happy with its touchscreen, though, which was very responsive whether we were navigating Android’s Home screen or playing games.
The stereo speakers on the bottom of the tablet produce reasonable audio when it’s in your hands or laid flat on a desk, but sound becomes muffled if you prop up the tablet to watch a video. There’s a small amount of distortion at maximum volume and it lacks bass, so you should use headphones to make the most of your media.
The AT300SE’s combination of a 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU and 1GB of RAM helps it complete the Quadrant multimedia benchmark with a score of 4430, which puts it on par with other Tegra 3 devices. It’s ideally suited to web browsing, as indicated by the 1,281ms score in SunSpider, but will also perform well when running more demanding applications. The AT300SE runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and it felt perfectly smooth when loading apps, dragging icons and so on.
The Tegra 3 has a 4+1 core design, which means it has four regular cores and a fifth energy-saving core that should prolong battery life when it’s not in use, but it didn’t make a big difference in our battery test, with the AT300SE managing just over five and a half hours on a single charge.
Although the AT300SE uses the stock Android tablet interface, Toshiba has added a few additional apps in an attempt to set it apart from the competition. Unfortunately, these aren’t particularly impressive. Splashtop Remote Desktop (a remote desktop app), TuneWiki (a music app that provides scrolling lyrics), and Skitch (an app that lets you annotate images with words and icons) are all available for free through Google Play. We welcome the inclusion of ThinkFree Office, though. The Toshiba Places shopping portal is an additional marketplace, with music, video and games available to buy, but everything’s provided by third party sources so you aren’t getting anything that’s unique to Toshiba.
The Toshiba AT300SE isn’t disappointing, but it doesn’t have any stand-out features that make it better than any other tablet. The Google Nexus 10, with its fantastic high resolution display, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.2, is currently only £40 more. The Toshiba AT300SE is a good tablet, but you can buy more desirable tablets with better specifications if you spend just a little more.
