The Toshiba Excite 10 ($449.99/16GB, $529.99/32GB, $649.99/64GB), much like the rest of the latest Excite line, is an attractively built and powerful?tablet. It's among the thinnest and lightest 10-inch tablets available today, and the latest quad-core Tegra 3 processor and Android 4.0 software make for a potent combo. It makes the earlier Toshiba Excite 10 LE?($529, 3 stars), with its older Tegra 2 processor, look like a pre-production model. Despite the sleek aluminum construction, there's nothing spectacular about the Excite 10, and for $70 less, you could get an equally powerful, feature-rich Asus Transformer Pad TF300?($379.99, 4 stars). It's less expensive than the New Apple iPad?($499.99, 4.5 stars), but that extra $50 gets you a much more impressive high-resolution Retina display and access to a more expansive tablet-centric app market.
Design and Features
The three tablets in the Excite line look nearly identical, from the Excite 7.7?($499.99, 3.5 stars) to the massive Excite 13?($649.99, 3 stars). All share the same streamlined design, with textured aluminum back panels and plastic outer edges. At 10.3 by 7.0 by 0.35 inches (HWD) and 1.32 pounds, the Excite 10 is a hair thinner and lighter than the New iPad (9.5 by 7.31 by 0.37 inches, 1.46 pounds). Along the left edge are Volume and Power buttons, as well as an Orientation Lock switch. On the opposite edge you'll find a 3.5mm headphone jack, micro USB port, micro HDMI port, and a full-sized SD card slot. The latter will be a boon for photographers who use standard-size SD cards, but instead of a flap cover, the tablet ships with a detached plastic cover that must be removed to insert a card?I could see myself easily losing that and being left with a large, unprotected slot on the side of my tablet. Along the bottom edge is the proprietary power connector, flanked by two relatively loud but harsh-sounding speakers under grilles.
Unlike the smaller Excite 7.7, with its vibrant AMOLED display, the Excite 10 uses a standard Gorilla Glass coated LCD with an increasingly common 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution. That's not to say the 149.5-pixel-per-inch, 10.1-inch screen is bad; it's reasonably sharp and gets sufficiently bright. But it lags behind top Android competitors like the Asus Transformer Prime TF201?($499.99, 4 stars) with its brighter 1,280-by-800-pixel Super IPS+ display. And it's no match for the New iPad's 264-pixel-per-inch, 2,048-by-1,536 display.
There's a 2-megagpixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. And like with most tablets, you'll only want to rely on the Excite 10 for casual photos and videos, as the cameras aren't great. The Excite 10 is a Wi-Fi-only tablet that connects to 802.11b/g/n networks on the 2.4GHz band only. You also get integrated GPS and Bluetooth 3.0.
Performance and Software
The Excite 10 is powered by the same quad-core 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 processor found on both the 7.7 and 13-inch models. As such, performance is largely uniform across the board, with very good overall system marks. These are among the fastest Android tablets available right now, and the Excite 10 delivers performance on par with the Asus Transformer Pad TF300, as well as Acer's quad-core powered Iconia Tab A510?($449.99, 3 stars). The base model ships with 16GB of internal storage, which can be expanded by a full-sized SD card (our 64GB SanDisk microSD card with SD adapter worked fine). I did notice occasional hang-ups, however, when adding and removing SD cards, and in a few instances I had to perform a hard reset. Otherwise, everything runs smoothly, whether it's switching between multiple running apps, watching HD video, or playing a demanding game like Riptide GP.
In the Excite line, Toshiba has left Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich untouched. There are no OS modifications, and only a few pre-loaded apps. You get third-party apps like Amazon Kindle and Quickoffice,?which are genuinely useful, as well as some Toshiba-branded apps that lead to content portals for e-books and other media. While I wouldn't consider any of them bloatware, the fact that you can't remove the apps is pesky.
Media playback was fine with H.264, MPEG4, WMV, DivX, and Xvid videos running smoothly at up to 1080p resolution. For audio, the Excite 10 played WMA, OGG, WAV, MP3, FLAC, and AAC formats without issue.
The 5-megapixel rear camera is average as far as tablet cameras go. Indoors, image noise is an issue and video frame rates drop precipitously, making the footage appear jerky. Outdoors, the 1080p video looks smooth and still images look reasonably sharp, but I wouldn?t rely on the camera for anything but casual shots.
In our battery rundown test, which loops a video with screen brightness set to maximum and Wi-Fi on, the Excite 10 lasted for 6 hours, 12 minutes. The 10-inch Transformer T300 turned in a slightly better 7 hours, 53 minutes, while the same-size Iconia Tab A510 turned in 9 hours, 34 minutes in the same test. The A510 is the bulkiest of the bunch, which makes room for a larger battery, while the Excite 10 is the slimmest of the three.
Conclusions
The Toshiba Excite 10 is everything the Excite 10 LE should have been, with a faster quad-core processor and better build quality. It's among the most-capable Android tablets available today, but you can find similar performance and more versatility in the more affordable Asus Transformer Pad TF300. Then there are Asus's docking accessories that essentially turn its tablets into netbooks. The Excite 10 is a better choice than the awkwardly large 13-inch Excite 13, but the Excite 7.7 is the best of the bunch with its excellent AMOLED screen and equally zippy performance. In the end, our Editors' Choice for large-screen tablets remains with the New iPad given its ultra-high-resolution Retina display, top-notch OS, and vast collection of tablet-centric apps.?
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