Toshiba Excite review: 13, 10, and 7.7-inch tablets

Toshiba Excite 13, Excite 10, Excite 7.7 review pictures

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The Excite tablets are quite the Russian doll situation. From a pure hardware standpoint, they're all virtually identical, just stretched or compressed into various screen sizes. All have super-slim aluminum shells, with dimpled silver backs that feel a bit like a golf ball underneath your fingers. The displays are raised slightly above the silvery edges, so the screen feels like it's popping out at you rather than recessed into the body. Their flat edges and rounded corners are comfortable to grip, even in one hand.

They're attractive tablets, simple yet elegant; fortunately they're also relatively well-made, something that can't be said for the Excite 10 LE. The tablets don't creak or bend in any worrisome way — they do still give a bit to pressure, but not nearly like the LE. The 13 also bends a bit, but I'll forgive that because it's enormous and because it never feels like it's going to break. One holdover from the Excite 10 LE, though, was that with some work I was able to get my fingernail underneath the tablets' aluminum shell. That's a little disconcerting — if my finger can get under there, so can sand or dirt or water, and that spells doom for any tablet. The Excite models are definitely a step forward, but Toshiba's not yet up to par with the high-end feel of the iPad or the Transformer Prime.

The Excite 10 and Excite 13 use the same display, at different sizes and resolutions. Both are Gorilla Glass-coated LCDs — a 10-inch, 1280 x 800 panel for the Excite 10 and 13.3 inches at 1600 x 900 on the Excite 13. Both look okay, but not great: colors are a little washed out, and blacks aren't as dark as I'd like. They're both a little dim, usable at max brightness but definitely not as bright as I'd like. There's some definite backlight bleeding, too — the screen's not always dark even when it's supposed to be, and it makes everything look even more overexposed and washed out. You can easily make out individual pixels on both the 13 and 10-inch models — the Excite 13's 138ppi pixel density is slightly lower than the Excite 10's 149ppi, but they look about the same to my eyes. The screens are responsive and have great viewing angles, but they're nothing to write home about.

In fairness, part of my distaste for the LCDs on the larger Excite models is surely due to the fact that the Excite 7.7's display blows them out of the water. It uses a 7.7-inch, 1280 x 800 AMOLED display — again the same as the Galaxy Tab 7.7 — and it looks fantastic. AMOLED displays have much blacker blacks and whiter whites, colors are amazingly vibrant, and 1280 x 800 is very sharp on a 7.7-inch screen. It's not quite as crisp as the iPad's Retina display, but colors look better, and for movies and images I actually prefer the Excite 7.7's display to the iPad's. Of course, the AMOLED panel is a big part of the reason the Excite 7.7 is so expensive, but it might just be worth the extra outlay.

5-megapixel cameras stick out the back of all three tablets, and much though it tires me to both test and write about, it's exactly what you expect. Pictures are soft and washed out, but they'll certainly do in a pinch if you have good lighting and you're not trying to print billboards. In low light, forget about it. The front-facing camera leaps the competition by offering all of two megapixels of resolution, but I can't say I noticed the difference — I could still check my teeth or video chat, but that's about it. There is a nifty panorama mode, but it's only cool functionally; results are pretty unimpressive.

All three also shoot 1080p video, and once again prepare for aggressive mediocrity: footage looks okay in good lighting, but colors are washed out and video is noisy and grainy even in the best of situations.

Toshiba's placement of its tablet cameras belong in the "design quirks that make no sense" files. The rear-facing lens is in a different spot on each model, and it's only in the right place on one: both front and rear-facing lenses are in centered above the display on the Excite 13, which is incidentally a ludicrous device to try and use as a camera. On the other two Excite models the lenses are banished off to a corner, making it awkward to try and frame a photo with either camera in any orientation.

Odds are good that whatever phone you currently own shoots better video and photos than any of the Excite tablets, so don't expect an upgrade here.

The three Excite models vary a bit in their hardware, but in use all three tablets are virtually the same. They all run Android 4.0.3, and Toshiba didn't do much to change the operating system at all. The settings menu has been redesigned a bit and a few options were added, but beyond that and the ability to take a screenshot by pressing the power and volume up buttons simultaneously, you're looking at very near-stock Android.

It's increasingly clear that the Android tablet market has figured out how to run the OS as well as it can be run. There are a few problems, sure — rotating the device takes a bizarrely long time, and browser scrolling isn't very good — but those problems are true on every Android tablet and are more Google's doing than any manufacturer's. In general, though, Android is fast and responsive, and it's stable and intuitive on a tablet thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich.

There's always a "but" with Android tablets, though, and it shows no signs of changing — there just aren't enough good tablet apps for Android. Most phone-optimized apps look okay on the Excite 7.7, but expanding elements designed for 4-inch screens to 10-inch displays looks pretty bad, and any phone app becomes absolutely unusable on a 13-inch display. Apps that are optimized, look and work great — but they're mostly games, and remain few and far between.

Toshiba preloads a bunch of apps onto the Excite tablets, but it's a relatively meager portion. A few are Toshiba's re-imagining of Google apps like the music and video players, plus a couple of third-party apps — most can be uninstalled, and none are particularly obnoxious save for the odd collection of card game apps, which have identically terrible-looking icons that make them stick out.

Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor powers all three tablets, to pretty much the same effect. It's the same very fast, very powerful processor that powers everything from the Transformer Prime to the HTC One X, and we've really never had issues with its performance. It's a great gaming processor, too, and there are a number of Android games that have been optimized for use with the chip. Shadowgun is smooth and playable, but download the Tegra-optimized version (which you'll have to pay for separately, sadly) and it jumps to a new level of fluidity and detail. As I mentioned, Android's software quirks are clearly the limiting factor in the performance of an Android tablet — the internals are plenty powerful at this point in the game.

Nvidia loves to talk about its 4-plus-1 core system in the Tegra 3, which makes the processor able to use very little power except for when it's called upon to do some heavy lifting. It works, mostly: all three Excite models have solid battery life. I got a full two days of heavy use from the Excite 7.7 — lots of tweeting and web browsing, a couple of Netflix movies, and an hour or so of Shadowgun each day. That's good, without being noteworthy. Since the internals on the larger models are largely the same, that means there's lots of extra space for battery, but it's clear that powering a larger screen also takes its toll: the Excite 10 and Excite 13 both lasted a bit longer than the 7.7, but not much. Also worth noting: the chargers may be large and cumbersome, but they seem to work. All three tablets charge quickly, only needing a couple of hours to go from dead to full.