Toshiba’s New Tablets Loom Large

Toshiba’s New Tablets Loom Large (and Small, and Medium-Sized)
If the Excite 13 were a laptop, its 13″ widescreen, with 1600-by-900 resolution, would qualify it for subcompact status. But it’s a strikingly large tablet — something I’ve been hoping someone would make. At .4″ thick and 2.2 pounds, it’s still reasonably portable, but Toshiba expects it to appeal to folks who intend to use their tablet mostly at home, not out and about. I think it could be a lot of fun for use with graphics apps: the iPad and other more conventionally-proportioned tablets are a tad cramped when it comes to sketching and painting.

The tablet has an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with 1GB of RAM and will ship with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich; as with all Android tablets, its single biggest downside is going to be the sparse library of Android tablet apps. I hesitate to mention battery life, since claimed figures so often bear little resemblance to reality, but Toshiba says it’ll get up to 13 hours. If true, that’s impressive.

Toshiba is going to offer a 32GB version of the Excite 13 for $649.99 and a 64GB one for $749.99 — fifty bucks more than the equivalent iPad in each instance. (The company doesn’t have any immediate plans to ship versions with 3G or 4G wireless broadband.) It plans to ship them on June 10.