Toshiba goes tablet with the Journe Touch

3 September 2009 16:35 GMT / By Dan Sung

Toshiba has joined the internet tablet crowd today with the launch of the Journe Touch at IFA 2009.

It has a 7-inch TFT touchscreen with a resolution of 800 x 480 and an aspect ratio of 16:9. The LED backlighting helps with a steady 300:1 contrast and eeks the battery life out to around 14 hours standby on a single charge. The Journe runs Windows CE 6.0 Pro that'll be fairly simple to get used to for most regular PC users and offer an easy platform to developers to work on.

There's integrated Wi-Fi 802.11b/g but no Bluetooth support and HSDPA will work with it but only if supplied by an external USB dongle. On the plus side, it does work with MPEG 4/H.264 codecs as well as WMA and AAC audio files, whether protected by DRM or not and, of course, BMPs and JPEGs as well. There are even a couple 0.5W speakers for playback.

The kit includes a charging cradle with HDMI-out functionality and there's a 32GB SD expandable 1GB memory for storing your vids. Audio playback will last around 7 hours but internet browsing will offer just 2 hours. That said, the Journe does come with one touch widget support for YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, MSN Messenger, FrameChanne and Acetrax which should help cut down on a few page loads.

The tablet will be out from Q4 of this year but no details on pricing yet.