Hands On With the Toshiba Excite 13

When is a tablet no longer a tablet? One might ask that question when looking at the Toshiba Excite 13, even though it is clearly a tablet given its lack of an integrated keyboard. The largest of any tablet announced or shipping, this slate is all about its generous display. But does a 13-inch display make a tablet too unwieldy?

At CES 2012, when news of Toshiba's 13.3-inch tablet prototype hit, I heard many snickers from colleagues who said that it was too big to be useful as a tablet. Make no mistake, it is indeed big: It measures 13.5 by 8.3 by 0.4 inches, and weighs 2.2 pounds. It is the antithesis of the svelte, smaller Toshiba Excite 7.7. But although it is noticeably heavier than most tablets, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Excite 13 felt balanced in the hand. Using it is mostly a two-handed, landscape affair, but it still works well.

Undeterred by the Excite 13's size, I dove right in with this tablet and began using it for a variety of tasks: viewing images, browsing the Web, playing games, and writing documents. The big screen served me well when I had a surface to rest the tablet on, but it felt a bit awkward in my lap. For the most part, the large screen captivated me, drawing me into the content and navigation in a way that other tablets have not. My touch typing was more accurate on the soft Android keyboard, too. I found myself caught up in using the Excite 13, to the point that I had to remind myself to switch my attention away from the tablet and back to the tasks at hand--such as writing this article.

In the end, the Excite 13 proved to me that a 13.3-inch tablet can be quite compelling for many uses. Admittedly, using one involves sacrificing a bit of privacy: The big screen is large enough that your neighbor on the airplane or at the café might clearly see what you're reading, for example.

This clearly isn't a tuck-and-go tablet, either. But the Excite 13 can pair well with another flat device, such as a laptop, stashed in your briefcase or backpack; you can use the tablet as a second screen, an arrangement that's especially convenient if you orient the tablet vertically for viewing documents or Web pages, since you'll get a lot of information on screen in a single go. The tablet stands wider than my two-year-old, 13.3-inch Toshiba R700 notebook (because the tablet's display has a broader bezel to accommodate the electronics and ports), but not so much so that it's obtrusive.

One drawback of this 13.3-inch tablet lies in how Google's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system handles on such a large display. Apps like Google's Play Music and Amazon's MP3 Cloud Player don't scale well to take advantage of the screen real estate. Vector Unit's Riptide GP looked good, but other games were a bit more fuzzy than I expected; presumably this happened because the games' assets don't match the 1600-by-900-pixel resolution of the tablet. Still other apps, such as 8Tracks, may be intended to scale between small and large screens, but on a display this large, images seemed grainy and pixelated.

Unfortunately, these weaknesses are tied to how Android and developers handle large screens in general. This means you'll get inconsistent results: When an app works well, it works very well, and when it doesn't, you're left wondering why Google let a free Scrabble game for phones be recognized as a tablet app.

When you're not using the Excite 13 on its own or as a complement to your laptop's screen, you might want to use it as a second screen in your living room. Unfortunately, the tablet lacks an IR port for use with a remote control app; an IR port is the one thing that would have made the Excite 13 truly appropriate for use on your couch.

While the big display comes in handy for working in productivity apps or viewing movies, it is especially immersive for playing games. Carrying a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor inside, the Excite 13 is perfect for gaming; on our GL Benchmark tests, the Excite 13 scored right in line with what we've come to expect from Tegra 3-based tablets.

In the end, though, it's price, not size, that constrains the Excite 13 the most. Though its size alone means that it isn't the tablet for everyone, its price will be the ultimate deterrent to adoption. The 32GB model costs $650, while the 64GB version costs $750. For those prices, you can buy a reasonably nice ultraportable laptop, or perhaps come close to the price of the slim Ultrabook you've had your eye on. No, those products aren't slates, but you'd potentially get more all-around use out of a laptop than you would out of a large tablet.

In spite of these weaknesses, Toshiba deserves credit for taking a chance on the 13.3-inch tablet design. For entertainment, as well as for document creation and consumption, the Excite 13 is like no other tablet available today. But the price of admission is steep.

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Hands On With the Toshiba Excite 7.7 Android 4.0 Tablet

Long before the Toshiba Excite 7.7 got its name, its prospects were cause for excitement. The tablet's beefy Nvidia Tegra 3-powered specs, its slim and lightweight design, its Android 4.02 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and its high-resolution AMOLED display all made it a front-runner challenger on paper.

Now that it's here, I can report that this model fully lives up to its potential. The only disappointment lies with its steep price: $500 for the 16GB version--the same as the larger-screen third-generation iPad costs--and $580 for the 32GB model.

Next to the iPad's pricing, the Toshiba Excite 7.7 (previously seen at Mobile World Congress as the Toshiba AT270) feels astronomically expensive. That said, it comes in priced just 11 percent higher than the next closest competitor, the Verizon Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, which is $450 with a two-year contract. Granted, the Verizon model handles 4G LTE wireless communications, but that tablet is also stuck on last year's Android 3.x Honeycomb operating system. And its dual-core CPU performance is notably slower than that of the Tegra 3-based Excite 7.7.

At least the design of the Excite 7.7 matches its premium price. Aesthetically, it pleases the eye, and it's in keeping with the design of the 10.1-inch and 13.0-inch models in the Excite lineup, sporting a bronze-colored, textured aluminum back with matching plastic edges and well-defined buttons for the volume rocker, power, and rotation-lock slider.

The design is deceptive: Though the Excite 7.7 lacks the contour of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, the two models are of identical depth, 0.31 inch. The Excite 7.7 is slightly larger than the Tab, standing 8.1 inches tall to the Tab's 7.7 inches; and at 12.3 ounces (or 0.77 pound), it's a bit heavier than the Tab, by 3.2 ounces (or 0.2 pound). Interestingly, the Toshiba tablet feels lighter in the hand, probably due to the balance of the components inside.

The weight of the Excite 7.7 is actually one of the more enticing features, as it indicates that LCD-based tablets are starting to approach a weight that's conducive for one-handed operation. The Excite 7.7 is not as featherlight as current E Ink-based e-readers are (some e-readers are half the Excite's weight), but it is notably light when held one-handed--a critical distinction, and advantage, for a smaller tablet like this. After all, many users like to hold their slate one-handed when they're reading, and the Excite 7.7's high-resolution display makes it ideal for that activity.

High-Res Display

The high-resolution AMOLED display is another major cause for excitement here. Android tablets have been painfully slow to get on the bandwagon of higher-pixel-density displays, and this model is one of the few to do so. At 1280 by 800 pixels, the display has 196 pixels per inch, not as dense as what the current 9.7-inch iPad has, but far better than what the 1024-by-600 Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 delivers. In my hands-on trials, text looked lovely in ebooks and Web pages, smooth and solidly rendered--and a welcome contrast to the pixelation I've seen on the lower-res competition. The 16:10-aspect-ratio display uses Corning Gorilla Glass and supports ten-finger multitouch, and it was highly responsive when I tried it.

Toshiba says the display is comparable to Samsung's Super AMOLED Plus technology, and I'd have to agree after a side-by-side comparison. Colors looked identical, with similarly high saturation but no oversaturation. The Samsung display was slightly better at handling blacks and whites; Toshiba's screen crushed the blacks and washed out the brightest whites in our grayscale-image test. Beyond that, though, the Toshiba tablet simply excelled at images, producing eye-popping color and reasonably good skin tones. On one of our standard test images, the Excite 7.7 provided one of the better representations we've seen of the skin tones and clothing; it lacked the moiré pattern evident on the Samsung model, though whether this result is due to the difference in operating systems (with the Samsung tablet still on Android 3.x) or something else is unclear. The Excite 7.7 also rendered images sharply, although--as with the other current Android tablets we've seen--images in the Gallery app had fuzzy thumbnails, and needed a moment to render fully when opened.

The last piece of big news about the Excite 7.7 is its Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. Tegra 3 is terrific for gaming; on our GL Benchmark tests, the Excite 7.7 performed in line with other Tegra 3 tablets. Games looked great on the display as well.

Additional Features

The Excite 7.7 has a MicroSD card slot (which supports up to MicroSDXC cards) and a Micro-USB On-The-Go port on the bottom, along with a conveniently placed (for landscape use) headphone jack. It also has a 2-megapixel front camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with flash, plus a proprietary docking connector for charging. The connector is larger and bulkier than most, as on previous Toshiba tablets; however, the unit appeared to charge more quickly in my hands-on tests (formal results and full battery life tests still to come).

Toshiba hasn't customized Android 4.0 much on the Excite 7.7, but the company has preinstalled some handy widget icons on the home screen; these widgets group related apps together for easy access. The company also tosses in a slew of useful apps and a handful of games to get you started.

The Toshiba Excite 7.7's zippy performance, light weight, and terrific display make for great usability. Now, if only the price of admission to this particular tablet ride weren't so high.

Stay tuned for PCWorld's fully rated Excite 7.7 review, with our updated tablet testing suite.

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Toshiba Excite 10 LE Review: Lightweight Tablet, Unfortunate Display

In a sea of me-too tablet slabs, the Toshiba Excite 10 LE—running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)—distinguishes itself on two key metrics. First, at 1.18 pounds, it's the lightest 10-inch-size tablet we've seen to date. Second, it's the slimmest, measuring just 0.3 inch thick. Sadly, Toshiba made a few questionable design choices in its construction and display that detract from using it, and make it a poor choice.

Another reason to stay clear: You'll be paying a little extra for the 16GB version: $530, versus $499 for the 16GB Apple iPad. (For 32GB, you'll pay $600—the same price as Apple's iPad, but $100 more than Asus charges for its same-capacity—and better-performing—Transformer Prime.)

Design Trade-Offs

Make no mistake about the engineering significance of Toshiba's Excite 10 LE: Constructed of magnesium alloy, the tablet feels noticeably lighter than competing models, including the close-in-weight Samsung Galaxy Tab Wi-Fi 10.1 (1.23 pounds). The Excite 10 LE was well balanced in the hand, and felt easy to hold one-handed in the vertical or portrait orientation, a common way of holding a tablet for reading books, magazines, and the like. No fewer than a dozen editors around the office handled the Excite, and all preferred the weight of the Excite over that of the Apple iPad 2, the current iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, or the Asus Transformer Prime.

The slim design does come with some trade-offs in physical construction. For one thing, the tablet is squared off around the bottom edges, which means that the Excite lacks the comfy, smooth tapering found on the iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and the Asus Transformer Prime. For another, the edges of the tablet have some give and some gaps, so that they actually flex away from the Gorilla Glass screen. While I wouldn't go so far as to say it feels as if it would snap in use, I wouldn't want to toss it into a jammed backpack and put any serious stress on it; an iPad could withstand that, but the Excite does not feel as if it would.

A few more design gripes, and one plus: The plus is that the Excite conveniently puts all of its ports—including microUSB (with support for USB On-the-Go, an unusual find), micro-HDMI, and microSD—in a row, along the left-hand side in landscape orientation. Above those ports sits the awkwardly-placed headphone jack. And the the slim, hard-plastic buttons for power, volume, and rotation lock—running along the top of the tablet when you hold it in landscape mode—lack distinction and are awkward to adjust, which makes them decidedly annoying to use. Finally, Toshiba continues to rely on a bulky proprietary charging cable that plugs into the centrally located dock connector (and jacks into the USB brick for power). Yet, oddly, you don't use this cable to transfer data directly to the tablet; for that task, you'll need a microUSB cable.

Mediocre Performance

The Excite 10 LE is the first Honeycomb tablet I've used in a while that had quite as many glitches and crashes as the Excite did. The Excite uses Texas Instruments' OMAP 4430 processor, which makes me speculate that perhaps Toshiba and TI need to work harder on optimizing the Excite hardware to work with Android 3.2.1 Honeycomb. Or perhaps Toshiba's implementation of the OMAP processor somehow makes processing tradeoffs in order to provide better battery life and performance in the tablet's slim form.

Whatever the reason, be aware that the Excite, with its launch software, crashed often on Google's own apps. The camera app crashed frequently; so did the Gallery app, e-mail, and the Web browser. Other programs I tried seemed fine; still others seemed to chug along compared with a smoother experience on other Android models. Toshiba says the Excite is upgradable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but really, with no solid ETA for that upgrade, it's a thin promise from a company that hasn't had a good update track record. It's also odd that it's taking Toshiba so long, since the company doesn't do any custom launchers or overlay tweaks to Android; instead, the company just loads on a bunch of apps to get you going out the gate, apps that include Netflix, Quickoffice, and Toshiba's own media player app.

Besides crashes, I noticed another glitch in the Gallery app when I viewed a folder of high-resolution digital SLR images. Like some other Android tablets (including several of the Samsung Galaxy Tab models running the TouchWiz software), the Excite struggles with properly rendering these high-resolution images on the first go. At least, though, the Excite gets there, sharpening up the preview render without requiring you to do something like zooming into the image first (as the affected Samsung models do). But it takes a moment, and your eyes can often feel as if someone's playing a trick on you.

Beyond the glitchy software, the Excite has a few other performance issues. Specifically, overall responsiveness was sluggish, and the touchscreen didn't always respond smoothly to my fingers.

The Excite 10 LE scored poorly in our display tests, too. The display lacked the color accuracy and clarity of like-resolution tablets. More critically, all of our test screens—from still images to a Web page to test patterns—were marred by a tattoolike pattern imprinted on the display. The pattern is actually the touchscreen interface itself, and it's more distracting—more visible—than the usual screen-door, gridlike touch technologies seen on other tablets.

On our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark browser speed test, the Excite was right in the mix, and on our custom Web-page loading test, it took 2.9 seconds to load a page—faster than the iPad 2's 3.3 seconds, and slower than the Transformer Prime's 2.6 seconds. On the GLBenchmark test with antialiasing off, it was competitive with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Wi-Fi, at 30.9 frames per second, but far short of the Transformer Prime's 56 fps. Finally, in our subjective testing, stills and videos produced by the Excite's camera were judged only fair; images had a lot of noise, and lacked sharpness.

Bottom Line

Physically, the Excite 10 LE still excites me, but solely from the standpoint of the ideal it represents in weight and size. I look forward to the day when tablet makers can achieve lighter weights and thinner designs, as the Excite has, but do so without making a slew of usability, performance, and price tradeoffs. As it stands, however, this lightweight tablet has to be relegated to the annals of tablet experiments.

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