TOSHIBA EXCITE 7C

Toshiba today introduces its latest 7-inch tablet, the Excite 7. Priced at a mere $170, the tablet falls smack-dab in the middle of the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 (2013) space. It’s more “tablet” than the Amazon model but it’s surely not the hardware that comes in the Nexus series.

The Excite 7 is a thick slice of tablet. It measures 7.8 by 4.6 by 0.43 inches (HWD) and weighs 12.2 ounces, hefty when compared with the 0.34-inch thin 10.24-ounce Google Nexus 7. It has a widescreen aspect ratio with big bezels, making it easy to hold without obstructing the display.

We live in a world where 1080p is becoming the norm on phones and seven-inch tablets, and 2560x1600 is the sought-after resolution on ten-inchers, yet Toshiba decided to put a 1024x600 display in the Excite 7. There's nothing Exciting about that – this is a resolution that was unacceptable last year, much less now, at the end of 2013.

Packing a quad-core 1.6-GHz Rockchip RK3188 and 1GB of RAM, the Excite 7 performed well for some tasks, but struggled when it came to more intense activities.

When it comes to inexpensive Android tablets, you'll be hard pressed to find something from a majormanufacturer that gets too much cheaper than the Toshiba Excite 7. For your $169 you're getting a pretty solid piece of hardware that will undoubtedly hold up for some time, even if the internal components won't keep up to speed quite as long.