We got our hands the Toshiba Excite Write tablet and gave it a test run...
The Toshiba 10.1 inch Excite Write tablet is a challenger on the market to a few brands that might be better known, like the Samsung Galaxy tab and the iPad. For that reason, it's always going to end up being compared, but with a few small differences, they're hoping to find their own niche.
Hardware
The tablet itself weighs just over half a kilo, and while it's not as light as a feather, it's not exactly heavy. Slap it in your fancy manbag, and it will get you through the day without weighing you down. The display is also 2560 x 1600, which is nice and fancy, and makes this a very good tablet for media, something you notice as soon as you start streaming your first Netflix movie or sporting event. It's also got a stylus, which is handy if you want to keep your screen smudge free and are a bit of a neat freak like JOE, and handy for clicking links and using menus too, as well as more creative things.
Under the hood it's packing an Nvidia Tegra 4 quad-core CPU (1.8 GHz), as well as 2GB RAM so it's up for handling almost any task, and it has 32GB internal storage, with space for a Micro SD if you think you need more. Battery life was impressive enough, very rarely charged it and even when it was approaching the end of the battery you would still get good use and multi-tasking out of it.
Design
it's a slick and curved design that is pretty standard. Although the back is still a sort of silver-coloured bumpy plastic, it is nice and still has a feeling of being premium. The only problem is that your hands tend to be where the two speakers are located if you're holding it up, which is not great. The Harmon Kardon speakers are always a nice touch, and give it some decent sound too, but even at the absolute top it can be a little quiet.
For streaming, the screen is pretty good for viewing from a few different angles, without being absolutely outstanding, but again hints towards this being a device that's good for media.
Performance and fun extras
It comes pre-loaded with Android 4.2 Jellybean, with only a few minor changes from Toshiba on the interface. Down the bottom you have a few Toshiba default programs like the file manager and media player, as well as a couple of pretty handy ones.
TruCapture helps you to take pictures using the tablet's camera as well as working on Relfection Reduction so that you can capture notes on whiteboards, from a book or other written materials with ease, and there is also a note writing app that allows you to use the stylus to jot things down and then export them as a whole host of different documents. In terms of usefulness and productivity, that's where you'll get the best out of this tablet, and there is also an optional keyboard that really would help you to keep working on the go if you needed to.
You've got Google Now, which is really handy and something that we're a big fan of in general (apart from the fact that all our devices know everything about us now, which is freaky), and with a powerful processor and plenty of RAM, the tablet works pretty seamlessly when switching between apps and moving across pages.
The rest of the bits and bobs you'll know from your average Android device, like Netflix, YouTube and all the rest, but the main question in the end will be this: do you actually need a tablet? If you increasingly find that your laptop is too heavy to lug around or that you're spending a lot of time traveling and need a media device, then a tablet is the way to go, and with the additional keyboard this machine will come in very handy.
Is this device better than an iPad or a Galaxy tablet? It's certainly an improvement on their previous efforts, but if you're an Apple head this won't sway you. If your loyalty is to Android, then this device is at least as good as the competitors if not better, and probably more equipped for being used as a versatile device more so than the others that we've tried.
