Toshiba Excite 7.7

Toshiba's Excite line of tablets?sport some of the thinnest and lightest aluminum-clad designs available today. The Excite 7.7 ($499.99/16GB, $579.99/32GB direct) is the smallest in a family with 10- and 13-.3 inch models, and its design and features rival the high-end Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7?($699.99, 3.5 stars). The Excite 7.7's ?incredible AMOLED screen, fast quad-core Tegra 3 processor, and slim aluminum frame make it a tablet to talk about, but it's a tough sell in a 7-inch market where most tablets cost between $200 and $350.

Design, Features, and Screen
Compared with Toshiba's older Thrive 7?($379.99, 3 stars), the Excite 7.7 is a work of art. The slate measures 8.1 by 5.3 by 0.31 inches (HWD) and weighs 12.3 ounces, putting it on par with the svelte Galaxy Tab 7.7, which measures 7.74 by 5.24 by 0.31 inches and weighs 12 ounces. The frame uses a combination of plastic for the outer rim and textured aluminum for the back plate. The result is a clean, modern look, with a sturdy feel for such a slim tablet. Along the top edge are the Power and Volume buttons, as well as an orientation lock switch. A 3.5mm headphone jack, microUSB port, and microSD card slot line the right side, while two speaker grilles flank the oversized proprietary dock connector along the bottom. Curiously, the oversized dock connector, which terminates in a USB plug, does not work for syncing to a computer?it only powers the tablet, while the microUSB port allows for data transfer between computers and external storage devices, but does not power the device.?

Unlike the Galaxy Tab 7.7, the Excite connects to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi only, accessing 802.11b/g/n networks on the 2.4GHz band. There is a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera and rear-facing 5-megapixel camera, but like mant tablet cameras, both are unsuitable for anything but casual snapshots. Pictures, even in good light, appeared washed out, with soft details in my tests. Video was even worse, especially indoors, with frame rates dropping as low as 9 frames per second and heavy image noise.

The real draw here is the incredibly vibrant AMOLED display?the same one used on the Galaxy Tab 7.7, but without Samsung's trademarked "Super" designation. The 7.7-inch, 1280-by-800-pixel display appears more saturated than on the New Apple iPad?($499, 4.5 stars), though Apple's tablet gets a bit brighter. The viewing angle is superb, but given the somewhat low maximum brightness and highly reflective screen, the Excite 7.7 is not a good outdoor performer. The 196 pixels per inch isn't quite "Retina" level, but it is still very sharp and the color richness can't be beat. The only problem I experienced was an overly sensitive auto-brightness setting, which became distracting as the screen brightness fluctuated too noticeably. If you manually set your brightness, this is not an issue.

Performance and Software
The Excite 7.7 is powered by a speedy quad-core 1.3GHz Tegra 3 chip with 1GB RAM and either 16 or 32GB of internal storage (and a microSD slot accepts cards up to 64GB). With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on board, the Excite 7.7 zips along through pretty much any task you can throw at it. Games look superb, apps run flawlessly, and switching between multiple running apps caused no hang-ups or lag. The Excite 7.7 also breezed through our benchmarks, posting one of the top overall system scores we've seen and besting the Asus Transformer Pad TF300?($379, 4 stars). As far as smaller screen tablets go, the Excite 7.7 is the fastest we've tested, easily outperforming the 1.4GHz Samsung Exynos-powered Galaxy Tab 7.7. As fast as the Excite 7.7 is, the Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0)?($249.99, 4 stars) delivers a comparably smooth Android 4.0 experience at half the price?though the Excite is better suited for graphically intensive games like Riptide GP.?

Toshiba adds some apps to Android 4.0 but doesn't heavily re-skin the OS. You'll find the standard assortment of preloaded apps, including a suite of Toshiba-branded programs: Book Place, Media Player, and File Manager. Third-party apps include Amazon Kindle, Amazon MP3, Crackle, Netflix, and a collection of classic games like Solitaire and Hearts.

Media playback was solid in my tests. The tablet was able to handle H.264, MPEG4, WMV, DivX, and Xvid videos at up to 1080p resolution. For music, WMA, OGG, WAV, MP3, AAC, and FLAC files worked fine as well. There is also an audio-enhancement option that lets you employ various SRS effects, including wide surround, volume boost, voice clarity enhancement, and others. With the feature enabled, songs sounded a bit fuller and less tinny, but you still won't want to rely on your tablet for music playback.

Battery life isn't a bright spot: In our rundown test, which loops a video with screen brightness set to max and Wi-Fi on, the Excite 7.7 lasted just 4 hours and 46 minutes. The Galaxy Tab 7.7, with the same AMOLED screen, lasted 10 hours and 40 minutes in the same test. Granted, the Excite 7.7 has a more-power hungry Tegra 3 processor on board, but that battery performance isn't good for a small-screen tablet.

Conclusions
The Toshiba Excite 7.7 manages to pack in most of the features of the even-more-expensive Galaxy Tab 7.7 for $200 less, although you lose the Tab's LTE radio and substantial battery life. That said, any 7-inch tablet priced at more than $350 is looking expensive nowadays. Both the Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) and Amazon Kindle Fire?($199, 4 stars) will give you solid performance, polished interfaces, and access to largely the same selection of apps, although the Kindle Fire lacks access to the Google Play app market.

There is nothing wrong with the Excite 7.7; its thin and light aluminum construction, superb AMOLED screen, latest quad-core processor, and Android 4.0 make for a compelling package. But at $500, it runs up against the price of the entry-level Apple iPad, and the Excite 7.7 still can't match the iPad's vast selection of tablet-centric apps and Retina display.?

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