Toshiba Excite 7.7 Review

Introduction:

Sometimes, it's rather difficult to establish a presence when so many other manufacturers have saturated the market with their offerings. Interestingly, that's the predicament that we find Toshiba in, as they're slowly trying to build up their brand recognition amongst the competitive Android tablet market. Fortunately, they're steering themselves toward the correct direction, which is evident by the Toshiba Excite 10 that we reviewed recently. Donning nearly the same hardware as its sibling, the Toshiba Excite 7.7 just might satisfy those consumers looking to pick up a tablet that's a bit more compact.

The package contains:

• Proprietary USB cable
• Wall charger
• Quick Start Guide
• Safety Guide

Design:

Essentially, the Toshiba Excite 7.7 is a miniaturized version of the Excite 10, seeing that it employs the same exact design. For a compact tablet, it's undeniably solid with its overall construction – aided by its rigid aluminum casing. With it, the tablet sports a clean finish that doesn't retain much debris. Furthermore, it has all of the lovable qualities of a premier tablet to make it stand out – like being svelte (0.3” thick) and lightweight (13.4 oz). No, there's no differentiation with this one, but nevertheless, it's absolutely one of the better-made 7-inchers out there.



Sporting the same set of buttons and ports as its bigger brother, we find a physical power button, orientation lock, volume rocker, microphone, microUSB port (data only), microSD card slot, proprietary docking port, and stereo speakers all around its edges.



In terms of cameras, there's nothing out place as we find a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel snapper in the rear, both of which can shoot videos in 720p.


Display:

Complementing its chiseled looks, one of the main standouts of the Toshiba Excite 7.7 is its brilliant 7.7" WXGA (1280 x 800) AutoBrite AMOLED display. Coining the "AutoBrite" moniker, it's essentially one and the same as the Super AMOLED display found with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. Obviously, it's highly detailed enough to make out even the finest of things easily legible from any distance. Additionally, much like any other AMOLED display, our eyes fall in love with its vibrant color tones, wide viewing angles, high contrast, and perfect black color production. However, we still find ourselves shielding it in direct sunlight.

Interface and Functionality:

Taking the sure-fire approach of being accepted with open arms by a broad range of consumers, Toshiba opts to keep the vanilla Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich experience for this tablet – much like what we saw already with the Excite 10. Naturally, some will no doubt like having the stock experience, but in the back on our minds, it would’ve been nice to see Toshiba customize the UI a smidgen by throwing in its own set of widgets, but nonetheless, it still boasts the deep personalization that we’d expect to find. Therefore, if you’ve checked out other recent ICS powered tablets, this one should be a familiar one.



Mainly due to the tighter confines we’re left to deal with, typing up messages on its 7.7” display can be a bit challenging in landscape – even more if you have larger than normal digits. However, we prefer using the portrait option just because our thumbs are better able to encompass the entire layout, while still proving us with a responsive rate of input.



When it comes to the core organizer apps, the Excite 7.7 doesn’t deviate from the typical experience, as the calendar, calculator, clock, email, and Gmail apps all follow in form to what we’ve seen constantly in the past.



Knowing that the Toshiba Excite 7.7 isn’t attached to any wireless carrier, the only things we find out of the box are quite a few third party apps – these include Amazon Kindle, Amazon MP3, Backgammon, Crackle, HW Euchre SE, HW Hearts SE, HW Solitaire SE, HW Spades SE, Kaspersky, LogMeIn, Netflix, Quickoffice, Rdio, WildTangent, and Zinio.



Processor and Memory:

Much like some of its highly esteemed colleagues, the Excite 7.7 is a power packed tablet that’s running a snappy quad-core 1.3GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor with 1GB of RAM. As expected, it seemingly flies with nearly all operations and rarely exhibits any form of slowdown or lag, which isn’t a surprise since this is the same CPU powering many other mighty tablets – like the Asus Transformer Prime. However, if that’s not enough for you, its benchmark scores seemingly confirm that it’s a juggernaut worthy enough to stand tall amongst the high-end Android tablet market.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	NenaMark 2
Toshiba Excite 7.7	3946	10507	54,1
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0)	2750	5144	30,2
Asus Transformer Pad 300	3872	9551	47,1
Toshiba Excite 10	4046	10675	47,7

In addition to its 12.65GB of available internal storage out of the box, it can be supplemented thanks to its ever-useful microSD card slot, which can accept cards up to 32GB in size.

Internet and Connectivity:

Hardly a surprise considering all quad-core packing tablets we’ve reviewed have been stellar in their performances, the Excite 7.7 follows in tandem with its great web browsing experience. Not only do pages load and render perfectly, but the fun continues on with its buttery smooth pinch gestures and kinetic scrolling. Facing pages with heavy Adobe Flash content, it doesn’t stutter one bit with its performance, as it continues to maintain a responsive movement with everything.



As of right now, the Toshiba Excite 7.7 is available in Wi-Fi form only – with no official word if any domestic carrier will be selling it with cellular data connectivity. Besides packing 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, the tablet also features aGPS and Bluetooth.

Camera:

Looking over some of the results produced by the Excite 7.7’s 5-megapixel camera, it’s another reason why some people wouldn’t even fathom using it to take photos. Overall, we’re dissatisfied with the quality coughed up by it, as it lacks anything worthwhile to mention. Well, it does so-so with outdoor scenery shots, but still, its details are flat and color production is on the cooler side. Indoors, however, you can kiss it goodbye, seeing that it’s diminished horribly by distortion, fringing, and general graininess. Worse yet, its LED flash fails to do anything to combat its deficiencies.




Seriously, when it fails to capture our eyes with its still shot quality, we already know where this is headed with video recording. Rightfully so, our suspicions are confirmed after looking over its 720p video recording quality. Again, there’s nothing pretty with the results, as its details are indistinct and that it’s marred by some artifacting when panning quickly. To sum it all up, it’s absolutely forgettable!



Multimedia:

When it comes to playing music, you can either use the always-reliable stock music player or Toshiba’s very own offering. With the latter, it doesn’t necessarily deviate from the foundational aspects we’re accustomed to seeing with most music players, but it’s still more than functional to use. Sadly, its stereo speakers fail to impress us with its faint output. Moreover, applying an equalizer option with the stock player does little to enhance its overall quality.

Mesmerizing us with its stunning AMOLED display, the Excite 7.7 is an agreeable option for watching videos. Having no problems running our test video that’s encoded in DivX 1920 x 1080 resolution, it’s actually the iridescent colors that it produces that wows us more than anything else.

Performance and Battery:

During our time using the tablet indoors, we didn’t experience any major fluctuations with its Wi-Fi connectivity. In fact, it’s able to maintain a sufficient connection at 30 feet away from a wireless router.

Setting its display brightness to the automatic setting, we’re glad to report that it’s able to provide us with up to 1 ½ days of battery life with our light usage. Oppositely, we’re able to get by a single day with heavy usage – though, there is an “Enabled Balanced Power” option that better optimizes its consumption.

Conclusion:

No longer regarded as a newcomer in the Android tablet scene, Toshiba is doing a great job in building up its reputation with its new line of Excite tablets. Just like its names, there’s a lot of excitement surrounding the diminutive Toshiba Excite 7.7, as it boasts top-notch hardware in a compact body. From its rigorous performing quad-core processor to its stunning “AutoBrite” AMOLED display, there are a lot of things that reels us into this tablet. However, we’re stopped dead in our tracks as we look upon the expensive $450 price point attached to this base 16GB Wi-Fi only version. At this level, it’s going to be a hard sell for most people, seeing that you can pick up things like the Asus Transformer Prime for $50 more – or on the other end of the spectrum, pay considerably less for something like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. Nowadays, pricing is such an instrumental figure in making a device successful or not, but with this, we feel it’s doing more harm than good.

Software version of the reviewed unit:
Android Version: 4.0.3
Kernel Version: 2.6.39.3-geaeacad
Build Number: IML74K.01.000050418