Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is the toshiba excite 10 le it's a 10.1 inch tablet starting at five hundred twenty nine dollars and its claim to fame as being the thinnest 10-inch tablet on the market that does seem to be true but it's a really small distinction at 7.7 millimeters thick it's less than a millimeter thinner than the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and only slightly over a millimeter thinner than the ipad 2 it is thin and it's nice and light at a little less than 1.2 pounds but again it's a pretty small distinction over some of the other tablets out there toshiba also make some pretty big sacrifices to get the tablet to be so thin the magnesium alloy body and grill glass display are both good but they're not put together all that well there's a weird lip on the back that actually sticks out and you can feel it and almost pry it apart plus the tablet creaks and bends a lot as you move it around there's a headphone jack a microUSB port a micro-hdmi port and a microSD port they're all really accessible and it's nice to have them all there especially the microSD port which is usually hidden and pretty hard to access on the bottom there's a proprietary dock connector which is enormous even bigger than apples and just seems unnecessarily large there are two cameras on the device there's a five megapixel camera on the back and a 2 megapixel camera on the front both are basically just like every other tablet camera we've seen neither is particularly impressive but both work in a pinch especially the rear camera the front camera is fine for video chat and actually takes better pictures than some we've seen but it's still not something you're going to want to use a lot we've been hearing about this tablet for months now and when you look at the spec sheet or use the device it really shows it uses a TI omap 4430 processor which is fine but it's definitely an aging chip basically everything you do just takes a beat longer than you expect there's some real responsiveness issues with the screen and it'll often take two or three tabs to get something to happen and games play at really low frame rates and we tried to play Grand Theft Auto 3 and either couldn't play it at all because it would crash or just had some trouble with frame rates and lag as we tried to move around it has a 1280 by 800 IPS display and in general looks pretty good it's not nearly up to par with the retina display on the new iPad but it's still pretty solid it has good viewing angles and good colors it's not really bright and again it has some real responsiveness issues but it's hard to tell how much of that is due to the screen and how much is due to the processor it also oddly lets you see the touchscreen technology on it it looks almost like an alligator skin and it's really kind of bizarrely visible as you look otherwise what you're getting is pretty much a pure stock experience of Android 3.2 honeycomb toshiba promises that android for pointing this spring but again we're always wary of it until an upgrade actually comes with the Excite tenant lee it feels like to schubas goal is to have the thinnest tablet possible at absolutely any cost so it's too expensive at five hundred twenty nine dollars for 16 gigs of storage or 599 for 32 gigs it doesn't perform very well and it doesn't even seem like a well-built tablet despite having pretty good materials you're paying a price premium over the iPad certainly and even over most competing Android tablets like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 or the asuste Transformer Prime and it really doesn't seem like it's worth it just to give a thinner tablet