Toshiba JournE Touch tablet review

Toshiba's JournE Touch is a 7-inch touchscreen with an ARM 11 processor driving the latest version of Windows CE (CE 6.0 R3) and it starts up in ten seconds.

It has b and g Wi-Fi, but not n (to keep the price down – a comment that we found ourselves making more than once) and we found both speed and reception inferior to a notebook on the same network.

There's a speaker on the back, concealed in the textured grip and a headphone socket on the side.

There are two USB ports; one standard and one mini USB, so you can connect it to your PC to copy files across, plug in a memory stick full of music, photos or videos to supplement the 1GB of on-board flash or connect a wireless broadband dongle to get online.

There's no accelerometer and the screen doesn't rotate (automatically or manually - although some apps will be able to rotate the screen).

The interface is very simple; there are icons for every app, with help and settings tucked away at the end of the list.

Tap in the corner to choose a wireless network to connect to; the other corner shows the current time and battery level, with an icon for opening the keyboard (although it usually opens automatically when you can type something into a field).

Currently there's a limited list of apps, most of them online tools. Some are familiar: YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Picasa. Others are less well known; Radeo, a streaming radio service and FrameChannel, a content aggregation service.

There's an RSS reader, and MSN Messenger for instant messaging and voice calls to other Messenger users – easy to use, with the limitations of the on-screen keyboard. You can play MP3 and WMA tracks (with or without DRM); the interface for music, video and photos is the same icon-based folder navigation with simple forward/back and play/pause controls.

The Weather Channel app is basically a weather widget. There's a simple calendar app where you can create reminders, but this doesn't link to any internet calendars, and a 'fridge door' for leaving messages on – this lets you type notes or record rather muffled voice messages, but it would be much better if you could draw or write in the notes.