Toshiba Excite 13

Toshiba's new 13.3-inch tablet?isn't a desk, or a serving tray, or even really a tablet. After a couple of days of using it, I realized what it is. It's a TV. The Toshiba Excite 13 ($649.99 for 32GB, $749.99 for 64GB) would make a great portable TV. But it's too expensive to become a mainstream hit, and it's missing the apps which could deliver good-looking HD content to its huge screen.?

Physical Design and Networking
The largest tablet we've ever seen, the Excite 13 is awkward to hold, and even a little awkward in my lap. There's a reason this thing comes with a stand, a completely separate squarish chunk of metal that the tablet sits in. The tablet is slim, though, and slides easily into a backpack for transport.

As for actual numbers, the Excite 13 is 13.5 by 8.5 by .4 inches and 2.2 pounds. It's very well-built, with the same aluminum body found on the Excite 7.7 ($499, 3.5 stars) and Excite 10 ($449.99, 3.5 stars) tablets and a flat glass screen. There's a micro USB port for syncing, but to charge the tablet, you need the included unique, laptop-style power brick. The tablet also has a microHDMI port, full-sized SD card slot and headphone jack.

You have to think differently to figure out where to use the Excite 13, but once you get into the mindset, it becomes easy: You'd prop it up in the kitchen for recipes, you might stick it on a side table in a hotel room, or prop it up at the end of a dorm room bed.

One thing you don't really want to do is put it in your lap. The Excite 13 is a long, skinny rectangle, and it's just awkward to hold. When I put it in portrait mode on my lap to play a game, the end of the tablet went off the edge of my knees.?

Other than video playback, there's another potential market for this tablet. Because the 13.3-inch, 1,600-by-900 LCD screen packs a relatively low 133 dots per inch, text is pretty large, and the touch keyboard is just plain huge. That makes the Excite 13 a good choice for people with mildly impaired mobility or vision. The flip side of that, of course, is that some graphics (especially in games) look jaggy if you have your nose right up to the screen.?

The Excite 13 is a Wi-Fi-only tablet and connects to 802.11b/g/n networks, albeit only at 2.4GHz. You also get Bluetooth and?GPS, although the idea of tacking this monster to your dashboard is pretty funny.

Apps and Performance
Running on Nvidia's latest quad-core Tegra 3 processor, the Excite 13's benchmark results are absolutely killer. This is one of the fastest Android devices we've tested, and performance is impeccable. Tegra-enhanced games like Zen Pinball THD and Riptide GP play very smoothly.

But, as I mentioned earlier, the large, relatively low-DPI screen can make some graphics look poor. Some of this is the developers' fault; I downloaded some games from Nvidia's Tegra Zone, and it became painfully obvious that some of the images in the game Princess Punt THD were being scaled up, for instance. But I also found diagonal lines on the Zen Pinball flippers a bit jaggier than usual.

The 133 pixels per inch is actually higher density than the iPad 2's 9.7-inch 1024-by-768 131-ppi?screen. But it's lower than most 10-inch Android tablets, which have around 150 ppi, and much lower than most phones, smaller tablets, and the New iPad, which generally clock in between 215 and 330 ppi. Whether you see the screen as low-res depends on where your expectations are, and devices like the 215-ppi Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 ($699, 3.5 stars) and upcoming 224-ppi Asus and Acer tablets have raised my expectations.?None of this mumbling about pixels per inch matters if you're sitting more than about two feet away from the tablet, though.?

Toshiba didn't do much to alter Android 4.0 here, only adding some pre-loaded apps, most of which you can ignore. There's a Flipboard-like news app, a Blio-powered book store, a file manager, and a custom DLNA-enabled media player with a better file viewing layout than the standard Android media player.

The Excite 13's size means it can pack a very large battery, and we got excellent battery life results?8 hours and 38 minutes playing a video with the screen on maximum brightness and Wi-Fi turned on. That's longer than the new iPad, which only managed five and a half hours on max brightness. The difference? The new iPad's super-high-res screen is a power hog.

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