Toshiba's new tablets are aggressively priced, especially its $110 Android slate
The last time Toshiba unveiled a bunch of tablets, it paid lip service to cutting-edge specs -- things like screen resolution and processing power. This year, it wanted to push the price down low enough that you'd actually buy one. The company has just announced two Windows tablets, the 8- and 10-inch Encore 2, along with the Excite Go, a 7-inch Android tablet. And while none of them might be memorable in their own right, they're all worth a second look, if only because they're so aggressively inexpensive. The Encore tablets, for instance, start at $200 for the 8-inch and $270 for the 10-inch. And mind you, they basically have the same specs (quad-core Intel Atom processor, 1,280 x 800 screens) as the original 8-inch Encore, which was originally priced at $330. (The 8-incher has been slimmed down, but that's almost beside the point -- it's all about the price cut.)
Meanwhile, the Excite Go will retail for just $110, making Toshiba one of very few tier-one brands selling an Android tablet for quite that cheap. For the money, you get fresh software (Android 4.4 KitKat), with a quad-core Intel Atom processor promising long battery life (up to eight hours, according to Toshiba). It also brings wireless display tech and comes with OfficeSuite Pro (a $15 app) pre-installed. The tablet does have pretty limited storage, with only 16GB of space built in, but even that's a moot point, as the tablet houses a microSD slot that can accommodate cards as big as 128GB. All told, the biggest tradeoff is the display, which features a piddly 1,024 x 600 resolution. Even then, that's par for the course at this price, so we can't get too upset about a few visible pixels. Interested? This goes on sale in early July, as do the new Encore 2 Windows tablets.
