Toshiba Announces A Massive 13-inch Tablet

Japanese electronics manufacturer Toshiba has introduced three Android-powered tablets, one of which is a particularly large beast.

The new Excite devices will come in three sizes – 7.7-inch, 10-inch and a huge 13-inch daddy of all tablets.

All three models are thin, light, and with NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processors on board. They feature a host of expansion ports that increase user’s options and come with a price tag that won’t break the bank.

Bigger is better

“One size does not fit all, so we are carefully considering how and where people are using tablets and designing form factors to best suit various needs,” said Carl Pinto, vice president of product development at Toshiba America Information Systems.

All three models will be dressed in aluminium shells and their displays covered with scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass. They will run the most recent Android version, Ice Cream Sandwich.

Excite tablets will be powered by the new NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processors that feature the world’s only 4-PLUS-1 solution for top performance during processor-intensive tasks and longer lasting battery during Internet browsing or video playback. Handheld gaming enthusiasts should be excited about the included GeForce graphics and 1GB of RAM.

Each tablet is equipped with a 5-megapixel camera on the back, along with a 2-megapixel front-facing shooter. All three tablets include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, but lack 3G support. Micro USB, Micro HDMI (except for Excite 7.7) and a full-size SD card slots come as standard.

Excite 7.7 is the smallest of the three newcomers, is 0.3 inches thin and easily fits in a pocket, yet still packs the punch of a quad-core processor.

Excite 10 is an 0.35-inch thin all-rounder, with 10-inch 1280×800 display and 10-finger multi-touch support. Toshiba promised the tablet’s battery will support up to 10 hours of non-stop work or seven days of stand-by.

Excite 13 with its 13.3-inch display offers more screen real estate than any other tablet on the market. The display sports a 16:9 aspect ratio and 1600×900 native resolution. The appropriately massive four-speaker sound system should make watching films on this device truly enjoyable, and the beefed up battery offers up to 13 hours of battery life and seven days of stand-by.

All three tablets will be launched between May and June. Excite 7.7 will cost $499 (£315) for the 16GB model, with 32GB and 64GB options available. Excite 10 will start at $449 (£280) with 16GB. Excite 13 will set you back $650 (£410), with a minimum of 32GB of memory on board.

Toshiba seems to like breaking records. Earlier this year, it released the AT200, the world’s thinnest tablet.

Tasty pie

With the release of the Excite range, Toshiba joins the long list of companies waiting to cash in on the tablet boom. According to research by Gartner, this year worldwide tablet sales will reach 119 million units, a 98 percent increase from 2011. And the market is set to grow further. Analysts expect there will be more than 320 million tablets sold in 2015.

Android tablets are forecast to account for 31.9 percent of tablet sales in 2012. Gartner analysts said the main issue with Android tablets has been the lack of applications that are dedicated to tablets and therefore take advantage of their capabilities, such as increased processing power and larger screens. Google’s operating system is predicted to almost catch up with iOS by 2016.

NVIDIA Tegra 3 processors are set to supercharge both smartphones and tablets. But how much do you know about CPUs? Take our quiz!