Toshiba Cellphone Accessories
Once known as the Excite X10, The Excite 10 LE $459.97 at TigerDirect.com 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 Tablet PC Accessories 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. 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 Android Smart Phones 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 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 $379.00 at B&H Photo-Video 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 Cellphone Accessories a pretty slim niche in a crowded Android tablet market.
