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Toshiba’s new DynaPad is a thinner and lighter rival to Microsoft's Surface

Toshiba’s new DynaPad is a thinner and lighter rival to Microsoft's Surface

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But not as powerful as Microsoft's Surface Pro 4

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Toshiba's first DynaPad, released in 1993, came at a time when touchscreen tablets were new to the tech world. The Japanese company's new DynaPad — a Windows 10 two-in-one officially announced today after a prototype appeared at IFA 2015 last month — joins a market flooded with tablet-sized touchscreen devices. But even though, like many of its peers, it looks a lot like Microsoft's own Surface, with a thin design, keyboard dock, and 12-inch display, Toshiba says its new DynaPad has some of its own unique features.

Toshiba says using the pen feels like writing on paper

Key among these is its extra-special stylus. Toshiba's DynaPad comes with a Wacom Active Electrostatics TruPen, capable of 2,048 levels of pressure, and compatible with Microsoft's Office and Edge in addition to Toshiba's own suite of business apps. Microsoft says the interaction between that Wacom stylus and the tablet's metal mesh sensor touchscreen was designed to replicate the feeling of writing on paper with a real pen, and the device's size was chosen to resemble actual notebooks. While it's certainly not the only two-in-one with a pen on the market, Toshiba says its device will feel more natural than its competitors', making for easier note-taking on the move.

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Those notes are recorded on a 1920 x 1280 IPS display that's been fitted with dual layers of anti-reflection and anti-fingerprint coating to stop you leaving dirty handprints as you write. With a 1.44 GHz Atom processor and 4GB of memory, the DynaPad isn't going to rival the Surface Pro 4 in terms of performance, but Toshiba says the tablet part of its two-in-one is the thinnest and lightest 12-inch in the world. Without its keyboard, the DynaPad weighs in at just 569 grams, and rises 6.6 millimeters high. With the keyboard folded in, that weight is increased to about 996 grams, and height to 14.9 millimeters.

The new DynaPad is available to preorder in Japan today, but won't be available in the US and Europe until early 2016. There's no word yet on exactly how much it will cost when it does hit stores in the west, but Toshiba says that before tax, it'll cost less than ¥130,000 (around $1,080) when it launches in Japan in December. See below for what Toshiba's concept of the two-in-one looked like at Berlin's IFA show in September.

Toshiba concept tablet hands-on photos

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