Tegra 250 - Toshiba AC100

I don’t want to deflect attention from those nice BeagleBoards, but it just came to my attention that the Toshiba AC100 now seems to be available to buy. This is the first Android-based NetBook with the nVidia Tegra 250 processor (1 GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core) that is not only announced, but actually in the shops now.

But knowing nVidia, they will probably try to keep most of the hardware as secret as possible…

Hmm, looks very tempting, RISC OS or no RISC OS!

I have the ‘Tegra 200 Series Developer Board User Guide’ – 41 pages/7MB. It’s mostly about the hardware on the dev board (with partial schematics), but it’s the closest I’ve been able to find to hardware docs. Can email it to anyone who wants it.

Now included on the riscos.info wiki page

RISC OS on the Toshiba AC100 would certainly ignite my interest :)

The Register didn’t sound too impressed:

“The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that I’m heart-broken by Toshiba’s cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long enough in these tablet-obsessed times for that to happen.”

I’d think it might be best to pay particular attention to the last sentence before considering a port.

True it doesn’t sound good.

I understand that getting hold of the Nvidia Tegra 250 development kit isn’t easy, if you live outside of the USA or Canada. So buying the Toshiba laptop or tablet does make it an accessible alternative.

I checked out the review at the Register, coupled with the article and reviews on Carrypad . Its launch would appear to have been a tad rushed – very much a bleeding edge product… I think I’m going to wait for the issues to be fixed before I buy one.

Andrew What issues were stopping you from buying please ? I’ve had one (3G) version since October, bought from Amazon, & been very pleased with it overall.

Well my ac100 arrived on the 24th.

It has been an interesting experience as the UI can be a bit strange at times…

But then you can say that of all Android devices!

For me the missing bit is Android 2.2 (i.e. flash support) – due earlier this month but has been delayed…

Apart from the above it is just about right for what I want a netbook to do – surf, email (which incidentally has the best support for MS exchange I have yet seen (and that includes outlook!)) and read a downloaded document.

Of course as this is a tegra powered device it will be unlikely if any other operating systems will be fully ported accross

Hi Keith, long time, no see. :-) I, also, was wondering whether to buy the AC100, but your last sentence rather puts me off. Could you, or others, elucidate? Bring it along to ROUGOL in January.

If you, for instance, google ubuntu toshibs ac100 you will see that although it is running there is an awful lot of work to do to make it usable.

This, as mentioned above, is that nVidia are notorious for being secrative when it comes to releasing information to allow others to work with their chips – the most familiar example for us around here is the graphics cards in the Iyonix…

I’ve been having lots of fun with the schematic for the Toshiba AC100 If there’s a Tegra datasheet out there, it might be enough to make a RISC OS port.

That PDF is password protected, but I ran it through pdf2ps and then ps2pdf and it wasn’t any more. Possibly !PDF or GView might do the trick?

That’s Tegra2, isn’t it?

password protected

Doesn’t seem to be here, after straight extracting using ZArchiver under Android.