Toshiba has officially unveiled its new tablet Excite 10 with some mid to high end specification coupled with elegant looks. This tablet are powered by 1.3 Ghz Quad-core Tegra 3 processor and runs on Android 4.0 Ice-cream sandwich operating system.
Not two months after its release of the "thinnest and lightest" tablet, the Toshiba 10 LE, Toshiba is back with a new 10-inch tablet: the Toshiba Excite 10.
It's not thinner or lighter than the LE, but the Excite 10 does bring Android 4.0, a Tegra 3 CPU, and an 128GB expandable storage option to the table. That may be enough to outclass the LE, but what about tablets that offer more than just a thin profile?
The Toshiba Excite 10 supports a huge 128GB expandable memory slot, has fast Tegra 3-induced performance, a comfortable design, and Android 4.0 capabilities.
As the second 10-inch tablet released by Toshiba in less than two months, it feels only natural to compare it with the Excite 10 LE. The LE is both thinner and lighter than the Excite, but the Excite feels like more care was put into the tablet's actual construction as it has none of the exposed edges the LE produced. In addition, the Excite 10's smooth, wide, rounded corners make it comfortable to hold in my hands.
The tablet is quite bendy though. Not a deal breaker, but also not something I appreciate in a tablet. Also, the edge casing feels like it could be stripped off if I pulled hard enough. Granted, I'd need to pull really hard for that to happen. To be clear, these are more nitpicks that I noticed than serious design flaws.
Excite also supports Micro-HDMI, Micro-USB, and a full-size SD card slot. The slot supports SD cards up to 128GB capacity, which matches the storage capacity of the Toshiba Thrive and trumps the 32GB capacity most microSD tablet slots support.
The data cable is longer and fatter than most and feels unwieldy and cumbersome as a result. Hopefully Toshiba implements something more streamlined in its next round of tablet designs. Beyond the design problems, despite an attempt on four different PCs, I couldn't get the tablet to show up as a drive after plugging it into either computer's USB ports.
Camera:
On Excite you'll find a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and along the top edge, about an inch away, is a small microphone slit. On the back of the tablet at the top right is a 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash light directly to its left.
Operating System:
The Excite 10 is the first Toshiba tablet to ship with Android 4.0.3 installed. The UI is identical to what we've seen on other Android 4.0 tablets for the most part, with a few small changes. Chief among them is the Enable Balanced Power setting that appears to dim the backlight, regardless of the current brightness setting, ostensibly to save battery life.
The other is Audio enhancement, which allows access to SRS sound settings like volume boost, clarity enhancements, and others. The audio enhancement feature clearly improved the sound quality of all audio when turned on, enhancing the previously muffled sound to something with more clarity.
Few Drawbacks:
Backlight bleeding is obvious when viewing black screens on the tablet. Also, its data connection cable is unwieldy, camera performance is unimpressive, and the price is a bit too expensive compared with what's available on the market.
Summary:
10-inch LED AutoBrite display with a resolution of 1200 X 800 pixels, it is also packed with Corning Gorilla Glass and has 1.3 GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor for processing data at faster rate. It is coupled with 1GB RAM and has 5.0 Rear camera same as Excite 13.
It uses a standard Li-on battery which gives a backup of upto 10 hrs, the connectivity features in Excite 10 are same as in Excite 13, the two devices are almost similar in specification and features except in the display size. Excite 10 comes with a price tag of $449.99 (16GB model), $529.99 (32GB model), $649.99 (64GB model).
The bottom line: The Toshiba Excite 10 provides Tegra 3 performance and huge expandable memory potential, but is priced a bit too high compared with other tablets.
