TOSHIBA ENCORE 2 10

Microsoft sparked a race to the bottom with the introduction of Windows 8.1 with Bing. And Toshiba cut the bottom out of the bottom line with its Encore 2 series, bringing Windows tablets down to the price of mainstream Android tablets.

Measuring just shy of 9mm thick, this Toshiba can't be considered in ultra-slim terms of the 7.5mm iPad Air or 6.5mm Samsung Galaxy Tab S tablets of this world, but it's a considerable reduction over the 10.7mm original Encore model.

One last note here about the Encore 2's 1,280x800 (16:10 aspect ratio) screen. The good news is that it's IPS, which means images are quite sharp and the viewing angles exceptionally broad. The bad news is that its resolution, while fine for a 7- or 8-inch tablet, is low for a 10.1-inch panel. We found ourselves wishing for a better-than-720p playback experience.

An Intel Atom CPU and 32GB of internal storage is pretty much par for the course when it comes to budget Windows tablets. Toshiba has, though, dipped down to just 1GB of RAM in this model, as we mentioned earlier. You do, though, get a newer CPU than we’ve seen from previous Windows-based slates.

Packing a 1.33-GHz quad-core Intel Atom Z3735G processor and 1GB of RAM, the Encore 2 has enough horsepower to tackle everyday tasks like browsing the Web, streaming movies and playing basic games like "Angry Birds Star Wars."

The Toshiba Encore 2 WT10-A is a very respectable 10.1in Windows 8.1 tablet. It has strong performance, so you’ll get away with running desktop Windows applications as well as tablet apps from the Windows Store. The display isn't the best we've seen, but the tablet's camera is surprisingly good.