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Home > Android Tablet Reviews > Toshiba Excite 7.7 (AT270 / AT275)
Toshiba Excite 7.7
What's hot: Gorgeous display, classy build materials, fast quad core with ICS.
What's not: Expensive, no HDMI port.
Reviewed July 9, 2012 by Lisa Gade, Editor
in Chief (twitter: @lisagade)
The Toshiba Excite 7.7 is easily one of the nicest small Android tablets that have crossed my desk. It has a 7.7" AMOLED display that's absolutely lovely and it's the first 7" class Android tablet to have the quad core Tegra 3 CPU (the Nexus 7 followed a few weeks later). The premium design with a metal casing and Gorilla Glass beveled glass are easy on the eyes, and the 7.7 looks like a miniature Toshiba Excite 10. They have the same design, textured metal back and controls— and both are quite attractive with a quality appearance.
In fact, nearly everything in our Excite 10 review holds true for the Excite 7.7: it's fast, very stable and the quality is top notch. The controls and buttons are easy to operate but not easy to accidentally press. The software customization is minimal (a good thing) and the software bundle is mostly useful. The tablet is very attractive and light: both important in a world dominated by the iPad.
The tablet has stereo speakers, a front 2MP camera and a 5MP rear camera. It has single band WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth and a GPS. There's a microSD card slot for storage expansion and a micro USB port that supports USB host (host cable not included). That means you can use USB flash drives (FAT32 not NTFS), portable hard drives, keyboards, mice and game controllers with the Excite 7.7. The tablet lists for $499 for the 16 gig version and $579 for the 32 gig model.
The Excite 7.7, like the rest of the Excite family, runs Android OS 4 Ice Cream Sandwich and there's no skin to slow you down. Stability is very good as is speed. In fact, Toshiba did well to wait and tweak their ICS tablets because the Excite 7.7 and Excite 10 have been among the quickest and most well behaved Android tablets we've tested (and we test them all!).
Display: Love it!
The Excite 7.7 diverges from the Excite 10 in a good way: its AMOLED display is drop dead gorgeous and the light bleed that plagues the 10.1" model is absent here (AMOLED displays don't usually have light bleed problems, unlike LCD displays). The only thing we miss from the Excite 10 is the HDMI port, which is increasingly rare on 7" tablets.
The 1280 x 800 resolution is relatively high for a tablet this size, and the result is extremely sharp text (sharper than the 1024 x 600 Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet) and great looking photos and video. Brightness is good but not among the brightest tablets, and AMOLED displays do tend to fade more in bright sunlight vs. their LCD counterparts. But overall, it's hard to beat the zingy yet not unnatural colors and sharpness of this screen.
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