Toshiba gives 7-inch Android tablets another shot with the $170 Excite 7 (hands-on)
To its credit, the Excite 7 has the same industrial design as Toshiba's bigger tablets. Which is to say, the back cover is made of silver plastic, with a pattern of small raised dots making it easy to grip. Fancy it's not, but it at least stands up well to scratches and fingerprints. The problem is, it's rather chunky, at 0.43 inch thick (compare that to the new Dell Venue 7, which measures 0.37 inch). And though the screen is readable from off-kilter angles, you can make out pixelation in the icons, even from a healthy distance. Which is unacceptable when you remember that other 7-inch tablets (including the Venue 7) go up to 1,280 x 800 resolution. Oh, and by the way, for $150, Dell's tablet also comes with 16GB of built-in storage, not 8GB. Ditto for ASUS' $150 MeMo Pad HD7, which also has 16GB of storage and a 1,280 x 800 screen.
All this might be excusable if the Excite 7 offered out-of-this-world battery life, but Toshiba rates it at a maximum of eight hours, which would put it on par with other 7-inch tablets, if not slightly below. Point it, even if you can't afford a $229 Nexus 7 or the $229 Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, Toshiba's offering here seems a little stingy.
