After being the center of attraction for media, users, Windows enthusiasts and others, Windows 8 will finally be out this year and with this curiosity to know what tablet manufacturing companies will have their names added with it has also increased among all!

So, any idea which companies will be tagged as Windows 8 tablet makers once the new Windows hit the market this year? Well, there are number of popular manufacturers that will get to included in the long list of tablet manufacturing companies, some of these are HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus which will come up with their Windows 8 tablet sometimes in October this year.

The other names that came into limelight for working on their own set of Windows 8 tablet to be introduced in the earliest possible part of 2013 happen to be Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, and Lenovo.

Well, as far as Dell is concerned, it has been keeping quiet about its plans for coming up with its tablet. It did launch the Dell Streak 10 tablet based on Android Honeycomb last year but it kind of kissed goodbye to it soon.

There’s a somewhat similar story about HP. It did land up into tablet market but couldn’t taste much success with its HP TouchPad which did gain popularity but it couldn’t last that long.

Interestingly, both the companies got ready to try out their luck in the tablet market once again with Windows 8 tablets.

Here’s a piece of good news for you, if you live in Japan and love reading electronic books, magazines, and other such electronic content. Toshiba has just announced a brand new e-reader with cool and attractive features.

Toshiba’s latest e-reader, named BookPlace DB50, is a full color 7 inch or 1024X600 device and is to be launched on February the 10th in Japan. And the buzz says that there are chances of its making its place in U.S. some times later!

On checking out the specifications of BookPlace DB50, you’ll find an internal storage of 8GB, 1GHz Freescale i.MX535 processor, RAM of 1GB, 802.11b/g/n WLAN, and Bluetooth with dedicated Home, Menu, Back, Continue, and Volume buttons. It promises a battery life of 7.5 hours and also offers a micro USB port, microSD slot and headphone jack.

This e-reading device will be syncing with the BookPlace store offering thousands of titles of books and looks forward to bring in many more in future. BookPlace DB50 is believed to be available at $284 USD. Will this new product compete well with Amazon’s Kindle Fire?  Let’s now wait for the launch first, rest will be told by the time alone!!

Hope you haven’t forgotten the AT200 tablet that Toshiba had announced at the IFA conference held in Berlin last year? Unfortunately, it never hit the market anyway, the company came up with its CES announcements yesterday and re-announced the 10.1 inch tablet and the best thing is that it now has its own official commercial name – Excite X10.

This incredibly thin device has a width of 7.7mm which happens to be about 1 mm thinner than iPad2 and Galaxy Tab. It sports aluminum back which makes it more uniquely snazzier compared to the other available tablets that come with plastic body which easily get smudged. Its IPS panel is covered with Corning Gorilla Glass and provides really wide viewing angles together with a native resolution of 1280X800. The processing in the device is done by a dual core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430. In the September of 2011, it was popularized to be superior to Tegra 2 from Nvidia, but now it’s the time that we got to check out how good it stands to quad-core Tegra 3 tablets.

It provides connectivity through 802.11n Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.0; micro-sized USB, SD & HDMI ports, doing justice with the slender profile of the device. Other features of the device include DLNA support, dual HD cameras 2MP on front and 5MP on the back offering 1080p video capture capability; GPS & built-in compass; stereo speakers with SRS. However, at the initial level, device won’t be offering any mobile broadband connectivity options.

Toshiba will be presenting their Excite X10 with Android 4.0 “Ice Creame Sandwich” once the device gets available in the market by first mid quarter of 2012. It will be available in two capacities namely 16GB and 32GB with $529 and $599 price tags respectively. Excite X10 will be Toshiba’s premium tablet offering along with the already existing devices making up their ‘mainstream’ options that will be available for $380 for 8GB, $400 for 16GB, and $480 for 32GB. A 4G AT&T HSPA+ option for 16GB device will also be offered by Toshiba at the CES at a price of $480, which won’t require any contract.

Other than its upcoming 10-inch tablet, Toshiba will also be displaying its Portégé Z835 Ultrabook at the CES starting this week. This 13.3 inch laptop will be offering a 1366×768 matte display, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM, second generation Intel Core processors & Integrated Intel graphics, spill resistant keyboard, a full sized backlit & spill resistant keyboard. The internet connectivity will be offered by three USB ports each being USB 3.0, HDMI, VGA-out, Wi-Fi and Wi-Di. With its pricing starting at mere $819.

Toshiba to land the ultrabooks market with its first ultrabook, Portege Z835 with a Best Buy exclusive at a price about $900 which happens to be $200 less than the price at which the ultrabook of Asus is available and $400 less than the price at which Apple is offering its baseline 13.3 inch MacBook Air.

And it is equally interesting to note that even when priced at such affordable rate, it has a great deal of things to offer. In fact, some reviewers have found it to be offering more features than Asus and Acer.

You get a display of 1366X768, Intel Core i3-2367M processor of 1.4GHz, RAM of 4GB and a SSD of 128GB under the brand name of Toshiba. But there are a few things which will disappoint you a bit like the color and presentation of the notebook is not elegant enough to be called splendid, again its flash drive isn’t that smart as one will expect as it offers a sequential read & writer speed of 185MB/s and 49MB/s that aren’t above the standard 7200RPM hard drive. Coming to Its SSD, it doesn’t do anything beyond imagination.

But then, you have good things that will make you happy. It weighs light with about 2.4lbs lesser weight than the ultrabooks competing it. Its battery life performs much better than those of Zenbook and MacBook Air, so you get a battery life of about 7 long hours when you use Wi-Fi for browsing the internet. Its connectivity offers you USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, VGA and HDMI out, Ethernet and a card reader.

But what sounds a bit disappointing for Intel and its partners is that ultrabooks didn’t start off that well.  Just in the earlier part of this month, companies like Asus and Acer were expecting to sale out about 100,000 units of their ultrabooks by the end of 2011, which was third of what they had originally targeted. According to the media, Asus and Acer have brought out much lesser than they were expected to do as they have reduced the orders for the ultrabooks by flat 40%.

It is notable that both the companies are pretty certain about the platform for longer time.

If you are one of those who simply love to own a slim and slick netbook offering wonderfully enhanced sound features then here’s really good news for you. Toshiba’s Sri Lankan Authorized Distributor Abans has just launched two new models of Toshiba Netbooks, namely NB520 and NB505, which are going to be the world’s first netbooks to have most innovative Harman/Kardon Speakers embedded in them.

One gets magical sound experience on Toshiba’s NB520 and NB505 as the amazing slim and smart netbook uses Harman/Kardon – the world’s smallest speakers that have great capacity to fulfill the music and sound demand that could not yet be much fulfilled in the netbook market.

What makes NB520 most amazing is the unique combination of power packed super-sonic sound from the 2 watts Harman/Kadon stereo speakers that offers beautiful bass and splendid treble qualities of sound in the petite sized netbook. Dolby  advanced audio is also supported by the system that gets you natural sound experience when you listen to music and also when you watch movies or videos through the HD quality (720 p) offered by the netbook. Users can save a lot of power by using NB520 because of the unique Sleep and Music feature that lets the users to listen to the music using the MP3 player on the netbook without the need to turn the PC on.

NB505, the other latest netbook series from Toshiba is especially targeted to people who want small and handy portable device offering the basic features that a computer offers at an affordable price. It offers all the basic computing consumption needs of the users. The one most astounding thing about the series is that despite being super thin and really light among the other netbooks in the market now, it uses an Intel AtomTM dual-core processor. It even has a special Sleep and Charge feature using which the users can charge the device without any need to turn the PC on.

Along with these two latest netbook series from Toshiba, Abans also has in store, NB500 series of Toshiba which comes with 3xUSB ports, integrated webcam, and V3.0 High Speed Bluetooth that has the capability of transferring the data 8 times faster than usual. It also comes pre-installed with Toshiba’s exclusive software tools such as Toshiba Bulletin Board and Toshiba Real Time. You can customize and manage your everyday activities using the Bulletin Board and locate all your recent files using the Real Time. These series also feature Power Saving Eco-Utility software with the help of which you get to conserve power as it lowers your power consumption which also results in longer battery life of the netbook.