At IDF, Toshiba is showing off its second entry into the 10 inch Honeycomb slate category with the AT200, which currently holds the title of both thinnest and lightest 10 inch slate.

Toshiba’s first 10 inch Honeycomb tablet was the Thrive which went for a utility-over-style approach. The Thrive is 16mm thick and weights 725 grams, but it also offered a range of full-sized ports such as USB and HDMI.

With the AT200, Toshiba is showing that they’re just as capable as the rest when it comes to making a svelte slate. To prove it, the AT200 beats out the current champ, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in both thickness and weight.

The Tab 10.1 is 8.63mm thick which the AT200 bests by 11% at 7.7mm. For weight, the AT200 undercuts the Tab 10.1’s 564 grams by 3% at 550 grams.

Impressively, the AT200 is even thinner than the recently announced Galaxy Tab 7.7 which is in the 7 inch category and has a thickness of 7.89mm.

Of course, the margin for these titles is quite thin, so things could change slightly, but just enough to unseat it, by the time the unit hits production especially when they throw 3G/4G into the mix.

Toshiba says that the AT200 will be available in a WiFi-only incarnation in December, while you’ll have to wait for sometime in Q1 2012 for a data-equipped model. Pricing is not yet official and specs are quite thin at the moment, but a 1.2GHz dual-core CPU has been confirmed so far. We’ll track down full details for you though, stay tuned!

The Windows Tablet PC reputation never really earned anything through the cheap netbook-based versions that hit the market over the last few years. Low power processors, lack of docking stations and capacitive touch layers that prevent anyone from taking advantage of the natural input features. The Samsung Series 7 slate should fix that!

It’s the first Sandy Bridge (2nd generation Core i5) tablet PC I’ve ever tried and wow, she flies. The digitiser works well and the slate will be delivered with a dock and keyboard as part of the package. It weighs less than a kilo and Samsung tell me it will return up to 7hrs battery life. Ok, lets take the 30% ‘marketing markup’ off that and call it 5hrs. That’s usable although I know from my work with Ultrabooks that you can easily get carried away and kill the battery in half that time.

I like it a lot, just like I like Ultrabooks a lot. They fit in nicely above consumer tablet and smartphone usage scenarios that are eating into the reasons you might buy a netbook and they truly negate the need for a desktop. This mobile/desktop usage scenario certainly helps to justify the price which, as can be expected, is going to around the same 1000-1100 € or $ level as Ultrabooks.

There’s another Series 7 slate article over at Ultrabooknews.

[ Posted via the Galaxy Tab. Ultra-Mobile at IFA 2011. For more IFA coverage, follow me on Twitter. @Chippy ]

A few minutes after the Acer Aspire S3 demo devices were brought to the stand I managed to get some hands on. Check out the number of people crowded round the devices! This is important for Acer as they bellieve its the next generation of PC device growth and it was clear from the press conference that they are betting a lot of this category.

The Acer S3 will launch this month in key countries. US was mentioned as one of those countries. Core i3, i5 and i7 variants will be available and prices range €799 to €1999

As we move forward with Ultrabooks, its obviously going to be harder for manufacturers to be different. It might mean that the price becomes the most important factor, at least at the low-end of the price scale.

Just to give you an early feel for the Acer Aspire Series 3 Ultrabook, here’s a quick `n dirty video from the launch event today.

I’m also uploading a Hands-On video that will be up soon on Ultrabooknews.
The Hands-On video is now available.
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We’ve learnt that the Asus UX21 and Asus UX31 will officially launch in a few weeks with prices ranging up from €799

At an Intel event yesterday I managed to get some hands-on with the Asus UX21. More testing is needed but given the potential pricing, this could turn a lot of heads toward the ‘Ultrabook’ brand.

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As you probably know, Chippy is in the trenches at IDF as we speak type. In addition to a solid hands-on with the devices, he’s also doing testing and keeping us up to date with some audio logs. Let’s first have a look at the blazing speed of the Galaxy Tab 7.7 as indicated by the Sunspider benchmark:

As you can see, the Tab 7.7 scores a ridiculously fast 1440.4ms on Sunspider which actually beats out the Onkyo TW Windows Slate that I tested a few months back by about 27%.

This score, which is thanks to a fast dual-core processor and the latest build of Android, puts the Tab 7.7 at the number 1 position on our Sunspider benchmark chart:

Chippy faily notes that Chrome has improved in performance since then so just I ran Sunspider on a fairly modern Atom based netbook (1.6GHz HP Mini 311 with Nvidia ION) and the scores are comparable with the Mini 311 scoring 1336ms, putting the Tab 7.7 only about 8% away from that score.

This is mighty impressive; here we’ve got the Tab 7.7 which is rated for around 10 hours of battery life, not to mention much longer on standby, and it has browser performance similar to a much larger netbook that has considerably less runtime. Intel might be in trouble…

Chippy Chimes In

Chippy was able to make a little time to share with us a quick audio log with some thoughts on the Tab 7.7 and the Galaxy Note. I’ll let you listen for yourself, but I will say that I share many of his sentiments:

The Lenovo U300S Ultrabook was announced at the Lenovo press conference in Berlin today.

There are two models, both 13″ with glass touchpad and a 17.4mm thick case. Entry level will be a 128Gb SSD model using a Core i5 at 1.6Ghz. I’m told that this model come in at just under €1000.

The high-end model will use the Core i7 and have a 255Gb SSD.

Both devices will be available in October.

Here’s the hands-on video…

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It’s about time Samsung got a true successor to the Galaxy Tab 7 out the door. Today at IDF they’ve announced the somewhat leaked Galaxy Tab 7.7, which features one of the largest AMOLED displays ever seen on a consumer mobile device.

Please excuse the video title typo!

The CPU has been upgraded to a 1.4GHz dual-core CPU which is apparently of Samsung’s creation, which they say can run 1080p video just fine along with DivX support; they’ve otherwise been quite quiet about the specifics so far. This sets the Tab 7.7 apart from most other Honeycomb tablets which use Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core CPU which runs at 1GHz.

The press release lists the RAM at 8GB, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that is a typo. We’re probably looking at 1GB of RAM. On the capacity side, you’ll be looking at your classic 16/32/64GB flavors with a microSD slot for adding even more.

From my experience with the AMOLED display on Samsung’s Nexus S, I can say that I’m quite excited to see the Tab 7.7 in person. This is the first mobile device that I’d actually want to watch movies on. Thanks to the AMOLED technology you can expect the 1280×800 screen to have an exceptional contrast ratio when compared to other mobile devices (and even some TVs), most of which use LCD technology.

The Tab 7.7 runs Honeycomb 3.2 out of the box with Samsung’s custom TouchWiz modifications, and they’ve brought the device down to an impressive 7.89mm thick and 335 grams (from the original 12mm thickness and 380 grams)! The back is made out of aluminum and the whole device does look impressively svelte.

The cameras have sadly not seen a big bump in MP (just 3MP on the rear camera and 2MP on the front-camera), but it’s quite possible that the optics have been upgraded. Both cameras have sufficient resolution for capturing 720p HD video, though Samsung hasn’t clearly stated that the device will be able to record at such resolutions.

It sounds like initially the Tab 7.7 is going to be released with carriers, but we may eventually see a WiFi-only version, as we did with the original Tab 7.

The unit has HSPA+ connectivity, and Samsung’s press release says it can make calls, but it isn’t clear whether they are talking about true cellular voice calls or VoIP.

Like the Sony Tablet S, the Tab 7.7 has infrared built-in for remote control functionality on your TV and other IR equipped devices.

Samsung says that the Tab 7.7 supports something called “WiFi channel bonding inch which is used for “bonding two channels into one for improved network connection and data transfer at up to twice the speed inch.

If Samsung can keep the AMOLED display from making the device too expensive, they could have a big hit with the Galaxy Tab 7.7.