It's an interesting conundrum. Will the gap between your smartphone and your notebook be filled by tablet style devices such as the iPad or the Dell Streak, or will "smartbooks", which have the compactness of a netbook, but offer a more mobile experience, emerge victorious in this battle? Or is there room for both?

Toshiba certainly seems to think so. It has had a couple of bashes at tablet style devices in the past, most notably, with the Journe Touch, and now it has unleashed its very first Android powered smartbook.

The Toshiba AC100 features a modified version of Android 2.1, running via a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 Mobile Processor. It's got a 10.1-inch, 1024 x 600, LED backlit display and is just 14mm thick at its thinnest point (and 21mm at its thickest).

Because of Nvidia's specialised mobile chip, it doesn't have a greedy CPU or a fan killing the battery in quick time, on stand by this smartbook should last about a week and you should get a solid 8 hours of usage out of it.

There's 8GB of NAND flash memory and 512MB of DDR2 RAM. Toshiba is stating that the device will be ready for action in under a second when powered up. It's very compact, weighing in at just 870g and measuring 262 x 190 x 14/21mm.

Connectivity wise, it's got an integrated 3G module to go with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options and there's also HDMI out and a 1.3-megapixel webcam for all your video calling needs.

One cool Android feature is the location based switch-able desktops. The device can detect where you are, and present you with your own customised desktop for the situation that you're in.

There's no doubt that the Toshiba AC100 has all the attributes needed to be the first truly successful Android notebook. Only time will tell though, as to whether the world wants a smartbook invasion.

It's out in August and we'll give you pricing details as soon as we have them.