The Toshiba Folio was one of the first Tegra 2-powered Android tablets to be released by a major manufacturer - or anyone else, for that matter - and in honesty, we had quite high hopes for it. Unfortunately, it appears that PC World, along with the rest of the Dixons family, has pulled the tablet from its shelves only ten days after its launch following a wave of customer complaints and returns.
A poster on the MoDaCo forums has managed to snag a picture of an internal PC World memo explaining that sales will be temporarily halted. For the time being, the tablet will stay on the shelves but the price has been hiked from £329 to £999 to discourage anyone from actually buying it. However, it's no longer available on the retailers website.
Apparently there were an exceptionally large number of returns and customer complaints on a number of different issues. According to other comments sluggish performance - despite the dual-core CPU running Android 2.2 - poor build quality, a lacklustre screen and the absence of both Flash and the Android Marketplace - both of which were promised at launch - were the most commonly cited problems.
Having caught wind of this development, Engadget popped in to verify the situation for themselves. Not only did they confirm the price hike, but the staff on-hand let them have a play with a retail unit which confirmed many of the issues that others had seen.
This news is especially disappointing, since on paper the Folio had all of the ingredients for a winning tablet - a speedy processor, up-to-date build of Android with access to the Marketplace and a reasonable price-tag. Dixons certainly must have thought so, since it signed an exclusive agreement to be the only UK retailer to carry the device for its first 21 days. As it stands, the Folio will have to be added to the pile of disappointing hardware powered by NVIDIA's Tegra SoC.
