The first foray of Toshiba into the tablet market, the Toshiba Thrive, though full of innovations with its user-replaceable batter and back cover, did not get the warm reception it was hoping for from the tablet-crazed portion of the population due to the fact that the 10-incher was bulky and hefty and rivaled the original Motorola Xoom in terms of bulk and heft. The company went back to the drawing boards and came up with the Toshiba AT200 which we first heard about in IFA 2011 in Berlin.
With the AT200, Toshiba did away with the bulk and heft associated with the Thrive and instead came up with what could possible by the world’s thinnest and lightest 10-incher. Since then, the AT200 went through several name changes and finally ended up being called the Toshiba Excite 10 LE. And today, the company announced that its next generation slate will finally hit the shelves in US shores and become available for mass consumption come March 6.
The Toshiba Excite 10 LE will come in at a price point of $529 for the 16 GB version while the 32 GB model will dent your budget by $599. Sad to say, the tablet will ship with Honeycomb for its operating system but Toshiba already confirmed that the tablet will definitely get upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and the update is expected to land on the Toshiba Excite 10 LE this spring. We also have the full details of the specs sheet of the tablet to get you fully acquainted with the Toshiba Excite 10 LE so read on and get your fill of the new Toshiba tablet.
In terms of its design and construction, the Toshiba Excite 10 LE packs a solid build quality that we have seen in other Toshiba products and the frame of the tablet is made from a high-quality alloy of magnesium that gives it extra durability while making it light as a feather. True to its form, the Toshiba Excite 10 LE is indeed the world’s thinnest tablet at its measurements of 10.1 x 6.9 x 0.3 inches, with the 0.3 inch getting translated to a waistline of just 7.7 mm, which is just as thin as the impossibly thin Motorola Droid Razr. At 1.18 pounds or 535 grams, the Toshiba Excite 10 LE also happens to be the world’s lightest 10-incher for that matter.
As for its internals, the components under the hood of the Toshiba Excite 10 LE are just as capable as those found in other high-end tablets from the competition. It packs a Texas Instruments OMAP4430 chipset which gives the tablet dual-core computing power courtesy of its 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor and full gigabyte of LPDDR2 RAM. It is available in a 16GB and 32GB configuration with the option to have that expanded via a dedicated microSD card slot. As for its display, the Toshiba Excite 10 LE features a 10.1-inch AutoBrite display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and aspect ratio of 16:10. It also comes equipped with a rear 5MP camera with LED flash while its front-facing 2MP shooter completes the camera department of the Toshiba Excite 10 LE.
With the Toshiba Excite 10 LE, the company puts behind its dirty Toshiba Thrive past and looks forward to the future. We really are interested in seeing how the new Toshiba tablet will go up against the bad boys of the tablet market and the competition with this new Toshiba entry ought to become more cutthroat that it already is.
