Toshiba's Excite 10 LE ($529 direct, 16GB) is the slimmest, lightest 10.1-inch tablet we've seen yet. At only 7.7mm (0.3 inches) thick and 1.2 pounds, it's even comfortable held in one hand, as long as that's a pretty strong hand. You'll pay a premium for the slimmest tablet on the block, though, both in money and in power, and even better slim tablets are coming from Toshiba soon.
Physical Features and Networking
Once known as the Excite X10, The Excite 10 LE looks and feels like a premium product. At 10.1 by 6.9 by .3 inches (HWD) it's super-slim, with a brushed-metal back and a groove around the smooth plastic edge. The Power and Volume buttons, and the lock switch, are in natural positions for your fingers to find. For such a slim tablet, there are a suprising number of ports around the edge: a microSD card slot, USB, HDMI, and headphone jacks, as well as a separate, large power port.
The 1280-by-800, TFT LCD screen is just okay. The Gorilla Glass covering the display is highly reflective, and you can sometimes see the pattern of the touch-screen actuators under the glass, which makes solid black areas look oddly textured.?
The Excite connects to Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n networks, albeit only on the 2.4GHz band. I had some trouble connecting the tablet to our office networks, but was able to get through after a few tries. The tablet's slender body doesn't fit much of a battery, and as such, we got only 4 hours, 44 minutes of continuous video playback with the screen set to full brightness. That's shorter than all of our competing highly rated tablets.
Android and Apps
The Excite 10 LE runs Android 4.0.3 on a TI OMAP4430 dual-core, 1.2GHz processor. It's the same processor you'll get on the Editors' Choice Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx ($199, 4.5 stars) smartphone, for instance, and it's faster than the Nvidia Tegra 2s you see in some other tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1). But it doesn't measure up, speed-wise, to the new Nvidia Tegra 3 or Qualcomm S4 8960.
You won't notice that in average use. I found the Excite 10 LE's screen to be very responsive, unlike, say, the supposedly faster Acer Iconia Tab A510 ($449, 3 stars).? While the Excite 10 LE's Antutu system benchmarks came in at half the speed of Tegra 3 tablets like the Asus Transformer TF300 ($379, 4 stars), Web benchmarks like Browsermark were almost up to par. The two places you'll notice the difference are in high-end games like Riptide GP, which are jerkier and lack some visual effects you see on Tegra 3 tablets; and on Flash-based Web sites, which operate slowly.
The fine performance here may be in part because Toshiba uses a completely stock version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The company did add some apps to try to get around Android tablets' app failures, though. Toshiba App Place is a quasi-app-store which lists several hundred tablet-ready apps in the Google Play market. Book Place is a bookstore; News Place is a good looking, Flipboard-like news app; and Crackle delivers free streaming movies. You also get Kaspersky antivirus, a media player app that supports shared servers on your local network, and a bunch of Solitaire games.
Multimedia and Conclusions
The Excite 10 LE comes with 16GB of on-board memory, and our 64GB SanDisk memory card worked in the microSD card slot. The tablet played all of our music and video formats, including H.264, MPEG4, WMV, DivX, and XviD up to 1080p resolution, and music in WMA, OGG, WAV, MP3, and AAC formats. There are various SRS-related sound options you can use to boost treble or stereo separation.
Sound through wired headphones and the twin stereo speakers on the bottom was unremarkable, but fine. Through a Bluetooth headset, I saw a slight lip sync delay in some video files. And 720p HD output from the micro HDMI port has an annoying bug which sent a slightly-too-large image to our Sony TV, clipping off the edges of the screen.?
The 5-megapixel rear camera has issues in low light, but brightens up considerably outdoors. In my tests, low-light and indoor images generally showed a lot of color noise and looked oversharpened. The 1-megapixel front camera was extremely noisy in low light. Outdoors, shots weren't bad at all, with decent color and light balance and much less noise.
Videos recorded outdoors clocked in at a smooth 30 frames per second in 1080p HD with the main camera, and VGA quality with the front camera. But indoor videos taken with the main camera were very jerky, ranging from 9-18 frames per second, even when taken down to 720p resolution.
The filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson once wrote, "Everyone's born with?one special thing." The Excite 10 LE has that one special thing. Its light and slim build stand out from the crowd of similar $450 tablets. But that isn't enough to overcome the competition. The Asus Transformer TF300 costs only $379, is just a wee bit thicker, and is much better for gaming thanks to its quad-core processor. The new Apple iPad (4.5 stars), at $499, has a far superior screen and a much broader library of tablet-centric applications. And Toshiba itself has the Excite 10 coming soon, with a quad-core processor in the same body for $500. That gives the Excite 10 LE a pretty slim niche in a crowded Android tablet market.
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