Toshiba WT310 tablet review

Toshiba's WT310 is a Windows 8 tablet aimed at business users that puts itself in competition with the likes of Microsoft's Surface Pro -- but can its spec make up for the dullness of its looks?

It's on sale now for varying prices between about £800-900.

Design and features
As tablet styles go, the WT310 is very much "utilitarian" chic. It looks and feels solid enough but is devoid of interesting design frills. It's no lightweight either, a bit of a porker at 825g and 12mm thick. There's a brace of speakers on board but the volume seems particularly low and the sound quality is nothing to write home about. There are also large grilles on three hiding a fan which kicks in regularly and is distressingly loud.

Connectivity options are pretty good, with full-size USB, micro HDMI and headphone jack all on one side, along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. For an extra £50 you can get a compact docking station that holds the tablet upright and offers additional connections, including two more USB ports, Ethernet, 3.5mm headphone jack and HDMI.

The 11.6-inch screen has a fingerprint-resistant coating which gives it a matte feel and is perhaps one reason why it doesn't look quite as sharp as it should, despite its HD resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels and vibrant colours. It doesn't seem quite as sensitive as it should be either, and often took several presses to react to our proddings.
The all-plastic stylus slides into a slot in the corner, which gives it one up on the Microsoft Surface Pro 2, which still encourages you to clip its stylus rather awkwardly to the side. As well as using it as a more accurate finger on the touch screen, handwriting recognition is available, so you can convert your scribblings to clear text.
Processor and Windows
It's powered by a 3rd generation Intel Core i5-3439Y processor clocked at 1.5GHz and backed by 4GB of RAM. Along with 128GB SSD memory we're getting into laptop specs territory but although this seems okay on paper it unfortunately didn't do much to impress, taking a full 3.5 minutes to encode our test 11-minute movie for iTunes (well behind the original Microsoft Surface Pro for instance, which took under three minutes).

It's running Windows 8 Pro rather than the very latest 8.1 so there's a little bit more of a learning curve for newbies without the reinstated Start button, which appears on the latest version. Microsoft Office comes as standard and there's a raft of security measures from Intel on board, including Anti-Theft which allows you to shut your lost or stolen tablet remotely.
Camera and battery
It comes with two cameras -- a three-megapixel one on the back, which has autofocus but little else in the way of frills; and a basic one-megapixel webcam on the front.
The battery does a reasonable job, though nothing spectacular, delivering a little shy of five hours of constant usage in our test.

Conclusion
The Toshiba W310 is a hefty Windows 8 tablet that boasts a large HD screen and solid casing, but it costs a lot, has a loud fan and delivers unexceptional performance.