Gadgetory

the Sheba's first Android tablet the Thrive was a solid device but it's bulky design made it larger and heavier than competing tablets the company's new line of excite tablets or anything but bulky at point three five inches thick the Excite 10 is almost half the depth of the Thrive and it packs a quad-core processor a gig of ram and a full sized SD card slot how did toshiba pack better hardware into a tablet that's almost half as thick let's find out I'm Bill Detweiler and I'm going to crack open the Toshiba Excite 10 Toshiba Thrive was a very laptop like tablet with its user replaceable battery full size HDMI and USB ports and SD card slot while this design made the tablet easy to work on it also risk making it too big and heavy for some users at point three five inches thick and weighing just over 1.3 pounds the Excite 10 is a razor blade compared to the Thrive and luckily it's not that much more difficult to crack open using a combination of metal and plastic tools I pop the back cover loose from the front panel assembly and lifted it off taking care to disconnect the speaker cable in the process now that I was inside the differences between the Thrive and the Excite 10 were clearly visible for starters the new tablets battery isn't really designed to be user replaceable and this eliminates the need for a removable back cover which the Thrive had also the excites flexible battery is thinner than the thrives hard shell unit second with the exception of the speakers all the excites internal hardware is mounted to the front panel assembly much of the thrives Hardware was mounted to a separate and rather thick internal frame in fact nearly all the excites internal plastic structures are thinner than the thrives third the excite tens display and front panel are permanently joined this makes it impossible to replace one without replacing the other but it eliminates the need for the lar mounting plate which held the thrives display in place lastly the excites overall hardware layout and internal design is just more like a tablet and less like a laptop gone is the separate Wi-Fi card gone is the removable storage chip and gone are the full size HDMI and USB ports but what you lose in full-size ports and replaceable components you gain in a thinner lighter and for most tablet buyers better tablet experience especially when you consider the Excite 10 has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and a gig of ddr3 RAM now to see more tear down photos check out my full cracking open gallery at TechRepublic com forward slash cracking open I'm Bill Detweiler thanks for watching