I will try to keep the written review compact not to exhaust you reading it but if you want to know more I recommend you to watch the video review for some more detailed information.
The main reason I wanted to review the Toshiba Excite Pro was not the fact it was a new tablet, nor the super high-res screen, but the fact it is the first Android device packing the Nvidia Tegra 4 (besides the Shield). I was really excited to see what the SoC had to offer and if it could make up of for the disastrous Tegra 3. But of course I will take a good look at the rest of the device for sure.
Design and build quality
It is build very solid despite being made of plastic. It feels sturdy but is also on the hefty side. With about 630g it is still ways less than the current iPad but it doesn’t really feel any lighter. It is made of plastic, not aluminum and packs a way smaller battery with supposedly only 4230mAh (4465mAh according to Battery Monitor widget), it is also not the thinnest tablet measuring at 10.5mm. Design-wise though it looks pretty nice. At first, especially on pictures the bezels seem to be too big but since it is a heavy and big tablet you will be happy for the space to grab it and hold onto. The bezel size is almost ideal to let you comfortably place your thumbs there. All the buttons and ports are placed very logical, nothing to complain here. The back is textured and has a nice grip even though not as good as soft touch but pretty good for sure.
Display
On of the most important things on a tablet and I’ll make it quick. Toshiba did an excellent job. Using a super sharp resolution of 2560×1600 (same as the Nexus 10) it delivers a brilliantly sharp picture. The color reproductions is very good, blacks are quite nice even though there is still room left for improvement. The viewing angles are superb, way better than on the Nexus 10 where I can see a blue tint/hue pretty quickly, personally I don’t like this blue hue at all and I am happy the Toshiba doesn’t have that. The brightness is very good, way brighter than I would ever need it to be, but I also don’t use my tablets outdoors that often. All in all I’d prefer it over the Nexus 10 ones because or nicer color saturation and the absence of the blue hue while tilting.
Sound
Overall I could sum it up in just one word, “meh”. Considering it is a 10″ tablet that has way more space to put adequate speaker into it isn’t realy that much louder or better than the speaker on my Nexus 7 (1st gen.). The loudness is the biggest disappointment, watching movies or Youtube is no fun at all, it is possible but just that. On some 5.1 videos I tested it was almost impossible to hear the voices loud enough to watch the movie. There are some enhancement options and you will actually really need some of them. The DTS wide surround isn’t one of those though. It makes everything seem to be too far ways. But you will need most others just to get an bearable sound experience. Even though the display is great for watching any video content the audio isn’t, be sure to use the headphone jack or use any external bluetooth speaker.
Camera
Since it is a tablet I don’t think the camera quality is really important. The quality of the pictures is surprisingly good but there is definitely something wrong with the video recording. The picture looks sharps until you actually hit the record button and then the video is getting totally out of focus and blurry, absolutely not usable for anything.
Performance, heat and throttling
Usually I wouldn’t put heat into the performance headline but there is a good reason for this because the heat and the issue that come with it make a HUGE impact on the tablets performance. I don’t give much about but since it is a brand new SoC I’m sure a lot of people wanna see it. I only ran the 3 most important once though.
Quadrant 12100-12700
Antutu 27000-28000
Sunspider ~850ms (using naked browser, I couldn’t get any Chrome results due to some errors during the benchmark itself)
Since I am more interested in daily use performance here is what I think so far. The general performance is quite good even though I expected something more after all the hype. It runs with what I call 60fps smoothness. The old Nexus 7 or my One X is what I would consider more to run 30fps smooth. I mean everything seems just noticeable smoother in a higher frame rate. This is most noticeable when scrolling on web pages not so much within the system itself. But smoothness is one thing, the device itself doesn’t really feel that much faster in daily use. It is more constant in opening apps quicker than my current devices, but those are also more than a year older. I tried several things like page load times and such stuff, not really that much of a noticeable advantage here. What also surprised me was that not even the rendering of PDF files was faster. I tried turning pages on my Nexus 7 and the Toshiba at the same time, even though scrolling and zooming was way smoother the actual rendering time was pretty much the same.
Browsing performance
Before getting to the heat issue part I have to mention the browsing performance which is very important to me. I used 3 browsers for the test, Naked Browser Pro and the built-in Chrome browser and Chrome beta. Shockingly the performance on Chrome was about as horrible as was used to it from my other devices. Page loading times seem to take forever and even when fully loaded most sites scroll so terribly stuttery, it is really no fun to use the browser for anything. Some few sites I tested were able to scroll somewhat smooth but the experience was nowhere near consistent or satisfying.
That´s why I switched to my current most favorite browser Naked Browser (if you missed the review,you can check it here). All of a sudden the browsing experience got so much better, pages loaded quickly and the scrolling was 60fps buttery smooth. Browsing this way is how it is supposed to be. Yes there are some very few hiccups here and there but nothing that really disturbs the pleasant browsing experience in any ways. If I get such a good browsing performance on my next devices I am totally fine with it. Sadly I don’t have the new Nexus 7 yet, so I can’t compare those 2.
After the horrible experience with Chrome on one hand and the fantastic one with NB Pro on the other hand I decided to give Chrome a fair second chance and installed the beta version which is known for always being slightly ahead in terms of performance and features. Admittedly the performance was noticeably better, with faster loading times and slightly smoother scrolling but in the end the experience was about the same one as on Chrome itself, a pretty bad one. That’s such a shame but also huge disappointment. I am not aware of any other Google product that is so terrible in doing its job besides Chrome.
To sum up the browsing section, if you want to browse please make a wide berth around Chrome and use something like the AOSP browser, NB or Dolphin instead. It is really not the tablets fault, I give all the guilt to Chrome itself. I have yet to see a Tegra-powered device delivering a nice experience on this browser, exited to see how the new Nexus 7 will hold up here. I can’t really say how other SoCs handle Chrome but Tegra definitely doesn’t handle it well and sadly I only own Tegra devices right now.
Heat & Throttling
OK, finally after all the performance talk I am now getting to address the heat issue. But let’s start at the beginning. When I started to use the tablet for the first time of course I wanted to test as much as possible as fast as possible. So I installed all my important apps and started playing with the device. And one thing was noticeable very quickly, the device gets hot, really hot, uncomfortable to hold hot. The whole heat is located at one spot, the left side around the center and slightly above, right where your left hand is grabbing it while holding it in landscape. And this heat doesn’t come up just by playing graphic intensive games but even while doing light tasks like browsing, tweeting and such. You don’t even have to touch it at all but it will still produce this awkward heat. But that is still not the problem after an hour or so the device got really sluggish, had trouble keeping up the responsiveness and scrolling got quite stuttery. My first assumption was the RAM, so I checked that but every time it was still above 600mb left, so that couldn’t be the reason. So i did a reboot and all of a sudden things where fine again but the issue appeared more and more often. I finally found out the cause of this when I started with the first gaming performance tests. I tried NFS: Most Wanted which ran fine not super smooth but well enough to enjoy playing it. (Real Racing and other games seem way smoother) But it only took me about 10 minutes, this mean not more than 3 races to notice something was really wrong here. When the 4th race started the whole game seemed to run in slow motion, somewhat still playable smooth but everything was super slow. I rebooted and it ran fine again for 2 additional races, then it happened again. I also noticed the back got seriously hot,crazy hot. So the cause for all the performance issues seems to be the Tegra 4 throttling not to overheat, but I have never experienced it that drastically. I will show you how bad it is in my video review, just so you can grasp the scale of the throttling.
I also did some benchmarks while throttled. As soon as it happened I left the game and started a benchmark, just look at the scores now…wow, really extreme. I decided to test if it was just the heat itself or if the reboot always solved the issue, so I set the device to standby and let it cool down…performance was fine again. So it seems the reboot just gave the tablet time enough to slightly cool down to recover, nothing more.
Quadrant 2609
Antutu 8846
and no, I didn’t miss any numbers here…
Without the heat issue the performance is there for sure, plenty of it. But I am not sure how much Toshiba is able to change here since I see the Tegra 4 as the sole cause of the issue. If you don’t play much games the issue is way less concerning because the device shouldn’t throttle that noticeable in daily use and it is also summer right now and all devices tend to heat up more right now anyways. But it is still a thing to keep in mind no matter what
Games
I briefly talked already about games but here are some things I noticed and wanna tell you. Besides the overheating issue the raw gaming performance is pretty good even though I expected it even better, I hoped all Games would easily run on constant 60fps but that isn’t the case.
Real Racing 3 runs pretty good, absolutely smooth but it isn’t properly optimized for the high-resolution so edges looks very jagged.
NFS Most Wanted runs good even though only at about 25-30fps I’d guess, it is playable but it could definitely be better. Graphics looks good, no jagged edges at least not in a disturbing way like in RR3. Heats up the device the most and soon turns onto slow motion mode
Temple Run 2 runs smooth,clean, all good.
Asphalt 7, runs great and looks great. I’d say it is smoother than on the iPad 3 but can’t tell for sure since I don’t have it anymore. But it is a really great experience due to the smooth frame rates, it is closer to 60fps smoothness than 30fps, maybe something about 50fps
Last thing to mention regarding Games and the throttling, even when throttled almost all games still were absolutely playable even though the menu within the game got pretty sluggish. Maybe with some less frames but not really noticeable that much, still fine. Also NFS Most Wanted seems to be by far the most demanding game and heats up the tablet the most. You can definitely feel other games not getting as hot as NFS, so the throttling isn’t that extreme that’s why the must still be playable what NFS surely isn’t anymore. In normal use the tablet usually doesn’t heat up enough to noticeable throttle. My initial issues must have been caused by the intensive use at first setup and testing. But even though Games still run fine throttled, the system itself doesn’t. When you leave a game when throttled and try to use the browser, G+ or anything else it gets super sluggish and laggy until the device finally cools down enough.
Software
The Tablet is running a unskinned version of Android 4.21. There are some few pre-installed apps but the amount of bloat is pretty fine. Since most of you know stock Android I won’t bother talking to much about it. It has some small stability issue, apps disappearing (not crashing) here and there but nothing to concern about , it really isn’t that often and maybe also caused by the overheating. I have no idea how Toshiba handles its updates but I wouldn’t hold up my hopes to high to get fast updates if any. I also had one System. UI force close that only could be solved be rebooting, but as said only ONE within the whole reviewing period.
There is no root available yet and I doubt it ever will be. Toshiba doesn’t have any xda support at all right now. So if you want to use root and/or custom ROMs please look out for another tablet.
Battery Life
I can’t really judge the battery life of the tablet since my way regular way of using Android devices seems to be very intense and battery draining. I never really get those good results like I see most other people getting in forums. But no matter what here are my results
Video
I looped a 720p video stored on the tablet using MX Player with a brightness of 11/15. I got about 6h straight out of a full charge. Of course results can vary depending on the video and brightness you are using.
Daily use
In normal daily use I managed to get about 4.5-5h of screen time (@ ~40-45%, more than bright enough for me) with about 12h on a charge in total. Standby seems to be very good about 1%/3h with auto-sync turned off during the night.
I don’t have that much comparison with other tablets but at least the battery life is better than on my Nexus 7 1st Gen. using a custom Rom/kernel where I get about 4h of screen time at best but only @25% brightness which isn’t as bright as the Toshiba was but that’s how I usually use my Nexus 7.
All in all it doesn’t seem that bad and I think it should get you through a usual day without any problems at all.
Charging from about 4% up to 100% needs about 4h.
Value
I paid 429€ for the 16GB version and I checked US prices, only found the 32gb version for 499$. So prices are very similar to the biggest contender, the Nexus 10. There is a bundle with an attachable keyboard but it wasn’t available yet, maybe something to consider for people who want to use it as a notebook replacement or are looking for an upgrade from something like the Asus Transformer
Personal thoughts and verdict
OK, to come to end of a pretty long review that was initially be planned being compact (I think this mission failed pretty badly) I wanna give you my final thoughts on this device.
The tablet itself is build very nicely and there’s not really much to complain about here besides the heavy weight and the (below) average speakers. The specs itself can easily be described as top-notch for sure. You will get one of the best possible tablet displays out there, high end performance with almost no lag what so ever ( keep in mind you will NEVER let me see calling a device 100% lag-free, I just don’t think that’s truly possible on Android because of many reasons but for now it seems to be as close to it as possible ) and an Android Experience very close to stock Android, in fact besides those very few apps that come pre-installed this system seems completely untouched, I couldn’t really find any differences (there are the video and audio enhancements but I wouldn’t really called that skinning in any way).
But besides all the pros sadly I have to mention the biggest issue of this device, the heat it produces and the thereby caused extreme amount of throttling I already explained in detail. If Toshiba would get to fix this heating and throttling I could really recommend this tablet if you are ok with the weight and the speakers, because otherwise there is absolutely nothing wrong with this device but it also doesn’t really stand out anywhere else. But I just can’t recommend a device on hope and dreams of Toshiba fixing this issue and I’m not even sure it is possible due to the Tegra4 itself. If you don’t play games at all you shouldn’t really run into any noticeable trouble but this device packs an SoC that is intended for high-end graphics after all and so this wouldn’t really make that much sense.
Personally I wouldn’t buy this device though because of other reason, even if the heating issue wasn’t present. For me 10″ in general is just to heavy, big and bulky. I briefly tried the Sony Xperia Tablet Z which weighs way less than the Toshiba ( about 130g), it still is just too big for me and I don’t like the boxy slab design of it, just doesn’t feel comfortable to hold. And the Nexus 10 never got me either, it always felt a bit under-powered considering the high-res display even in general use. But if you could ignore the downsides you could still give it a chance as long as you can return it. But one last thing, don’t even think about using the device in a case that covers the back, I am pretty sure this won’t end well. I put mine on my leather couch for 30 minutes while playing a video and it heated up so fast the whole video started stuttering very bad.
If you want a 10″ tablet I think it is better to wait for the new Nexus 10 or one of the new Asus tablets which should both have some advantages like better support, design, weight and so on.