Toshiba Excite 7.7 Tablet: Price, Specifications and Review

Tablet…Tablet….Tablet, Everyday one new tablet is announced from the well-known company. Now it’s time of Japanese multinational electronic company, “Toshiba” which has announced 7.7-inch Excite tablet on 10th April, 2012 at the price tag of $500. If you are planning to purchase the new iPad for a tablet, then you should check out the features of Toshiba’s latest Excite 7.7, which is two inches bigger than iPad and offered with all the features that you want in your tablet.

The Toshiba Excite 7.7 comes with Google’s latest Ice Cream Sandwich tablet and fast quad-core Tegra 3 processor. It is the smallest version of Excite tablet line-up as two other Excite tablets are available with 10 and 13.3 inch display screen. It gives very tough fight to the high-end Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, which is 11% lower in price.

Design:

Excite 7.7 is the smallest in Toshiba series, which is 8 inches wide, 0.31 inches thick, 5.31 inches tall and 12.3 ounces in weight. It is little bit larger and heavier compared to Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) and bigger compared to Kindle Fire. It easily stows into your bag and fits inside jacket pockets comfortably. It is wrapped with sparkling wine silver aluminum surface. The surface made this tablet tremendously easy to hold, but the minor fault is that it does not look elegant like Excite 10 LE. The top border of the tablet is available with Power and Volume buttons and orientation lock switch, while the bottom side is available with two productivity speakers and the power/docking connector. Right border is packed with microSD card slot which enables users to expand the internal memory up to 128 GB.

Display:

The display is the main part of any tablet. It comes with 7.7-inch Gorilla Glass AMOLED display, which gives 1280 x 800 pixel resolution. The display screen makes website text look crisp and sharp, photo extremely clear, and text looks lovely in eBooks; but it is not enough for playing a game or watching movies. It delivers brilliant color, contrast and clarity. It supports ten-finger multi-touch, and vibrant softly with every touch of the screen. No need of worrying about scratches when tablet drops down from kitchen table or similar heights, because it saves some minor bruises and scratches. It feels like overload while swiping between home screens. Due to its wide viewing angles, three people can enjoy the action comfortably sitting side by side.

Camera:

Toshiba Excite 7.7 is equipped with 5 megapixel rear camera and 2 megapixel front-facing camera. The Image clarity will definitely disappoint photo enthusiast. The high megapixels are not everything and it has been proved by Samsung 7.7” galaxy tab, which gives amazing picture quality with 3.2-megapixel cam. The performance of camera is bad and unsuitable for anything but casual snapshots. Pictures captured in good light also appears washed out, overexposed lighting, a lack of detail and a ridiculously high amount of noise. By the same camera, you can capture 1080p video but the result will frustrate you because just like picture, it is also worst with frame rates dropping as low as 9 fps and heavy image noise.

People can also take picture by 2-megapixel front-facing camera but they may be disappointed with the results. The camera also offers night scene, don’t anticipate capturing a large amount of errant background light. The LED flash of the camera enables users to capture photos in the dark to small extent. It is little bit weak compared to most reviewed LEDs. It also gives five scene modes, simple exposure adjustments and five white balance options.

Software:

The Excite 7.7 tablet runs Goggle’s latest Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. It gives the typical five home screens and ubiquitous system bar besides the bottom with icons for Back, Home and Recent Apps. It enables users to create folders on the home screen and take screenshots by pressing the power and volume up button at the same time. If you don’t like the stock Android keyboard, then no need to worry because it has included Swype, so you can easily discover other keyboards throughout the Play Store. It also offers balanced power mode and toggle switch for SRS audio enhancement.

Application:

The smallest version of Excite series is loaded with great selection of multimedia apps and entertainment apps like Netflix, Amazon Kindle, Zinio, Quickoffice, LogMeIn, PrinterShare, Adobe Reader, Crackle, Rdio, Amazon MP3, five card games, News Place, Book Place, Media Player, Toshiba File Manager, and Kaspersky Tablet Security apps. You are also able to disable apps that you don’t need. You cannot disable some other applications like Google+, Flash Player, Maps, Messenger, Navigation and Radio. Using Aupeo application, you can create custom stations by artist and genre. Crackle application enables users to stream some most popular movies such as “The Patriot,” “The Da Vinci Code,” and “Men in Black” and also TV shows like “News Radio” and “Seinfeld”.

Performance:

A Toshiba Excite tablet is powered by Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, which is capable of running even the most demanding apps. It is also packed with 1GB of RAM, which makes it one of the most powerful 7-inch tablets around. The CPU is really notable, it gives some lag time when changing tablet from portrait to landscape mode, opening large application, and delivering text after pinch-zooming, swiping the different home screen pages, zooming on photos, and scrolling through the app drawer. You can play games and videos smoothly and quickly. For the connectivity, it gives Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot and Bluetooth. It comes with microUSBport for syncing, MicroSD card slot for expandability, GPS, digital compass capabilities, a gyroscope and an accelerometer.

Battery:

It is packed with prismatic lithium polymer 1-cell battery, which runs up to 13 hours with full charge. You can enjoy the video for more than 10 hours. If you are using your tablet for browsing the web, playing games, checking your email and social networks regularly, then the battery will run up to 2 days with single charge.

Conclusion:

Overall, the Toshiba Excite 7.7 is good, but it is more expensive than other tablets. It’s superb AMOLED screen, Android 4.0 ICS OS, thin and light aluminum construction, latest quad-core processor makes its ideal package for people. It has no HDMI support as well as gives only 16GB of storage. Camera feature is very bad, with high megapixel it gives low quality images. If you want to get more internal storage capacity, you have to pay $80 more, because 32GB Excite 7.7 version is available at the price of $580.

Excite 7.7 Price:

• $500 for 16GB model
• $580 for 32GB model

Pros

• Gorgeous display
• Fast and reliable
• Quad core processor
• Thin and light body, measuring less than 9.5mm/0.37inches (0.30 inches)
• Lots of RAM (1024 MB RAM)
• HDMI connector for TV-out (Micro HDMI (Type D))

Cons

• Lacks an ambient light sensor for automatic screen brightness adjustment
• Imperfect build quality
• Really expensive

Toshiba Excite 7.7 Specifications:

Get hands on review of Toshiba Excite 7.7 through youtube video: