Toshiba Excite 7 review: A functional budget tablet lacking extras

Even though the Toshiba 7 has a temptingly low-price, if you're in the market for a budget tablet, keep your options open. The Excite 7 isn't as breathtaking as its name would suggest, donning an overwhelmingly plastic design and unfashionably dull display that's accented by lackluster performance.

6.0

Toshiba Excite 7

The Good

The <b>Toshiba Excite 7</b> tablet is competitively priced and features a microSD card expansion slot.

The Bad

Its plastic-y body feels cheap and performance slows significantly if multiple apps are open. The low resolution screen looks pixelated and dull compared to other similarly priced tablets, and it's sometimes unresponsive.

The Bottom Line

Though low-priced, the <b>Toshiba Excite 7</b> fails to offer as much value as other budget tablets.

At its $169 starting price, 7-inch device lacks any interesting or compelling reason to choose it over tablets in the same price range with similar specs, better performance, and higher screen resolutions.

With the number -- and quality -- of tablets under $200 impressively increasing, the Toshiba Excite 7 morosely falls short of ranking in the top budget tablet list.

Toshiba Excite 7 tablet dully falls short

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Design
If the Excite 7 looks familiar, it's probably because it features Toshiba's tablet house design for 2013. The same black-bezel and textured plastic gray backside that's seen on 10-inch Excite tablets, like the Pro, Pure, and Write, is also found on the 7-inch slate.

The bumpy texture on the plastic back panel works better on the Excite 7's smaller form, helping slightly to grip the device. Although its back panel has rounded edges, the front panel features a rigid edge that can uncomfortably dig into your palms if held at an angle leaning towards your body.

For such a girthy tablet, the device feels slightly hollow -- and cheap -- when you hold it, but it's still rather comfortable to hold. However, it doesn't provide a melt-in-your-palms experience.

The 7-inch Excite's design is geared towards a portrait-orientation, with all of the ports on the top edge, speakers on the bottom edge, and power button on the right. The top edge houses the volume rocker, microSD card expansion slot, micro-USB port, and headphone jack -- which doubles as a microphone jack.

Features
The Excite 7 tablet ships with an almost pure version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and comes loaded with some Toshiba software, including Service Station -- which manages app updates -- a file manager, and user's guide.

Hardware
The Toshiba Excite 7 houses a 1.6GHz quad-core Rockchip RK3188 CPU, Mali 400MP quad-core GPU, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB or 16GB of internal storage, with a microSD card expansion slot.

The front of the tablet houses a 0.3-megapixel camera, with a 3-megapixel one on the rear. Other additions include an accelerometer and Bluetooth 4.0.

Performance
A sub-par screen on a budget tablet is expected, but even with low standards, the Excite 7 falls short of providing a visually stunning display. Colors are slightly dull and the 1,024x600 resolution is evident in visibly pixelated small text and images.

The tablet has good viewing angles but, depending on the environment you're in, sometimes the glare overwhelms the image on screen.

The touch screen occasionally lagged and was sometimes unresponsive. A few times, my swipe to unlock the screen was recognized, but the gesture didn't result in the device unlocking itself, no matter how many times I swiped. Instead of looking like a frustrated toddler playing Fruit Ninja with my lock screen, I set it down and tried again a few minutes later with no problems.

The Excite 7's inconsistent touch screen combined with randomly buggy behavior made for a couple frustrating experiences, like the one above. Skype would often crash while trying to start a video conference and, for those who care, it's not compatible with Instagram.

When many apps are open at once, performance notably slows down. The same can be said of attempting to multitask, or when downloading various files. Performance is considerably smoother if you execute one task at a time.

As a gaming device, the Excite 7 doesn't exactly live up to its name. Simple mobile games run smoothly, as long as there aren't a lot of apps running in the background, and larger games take a longer time to load but run smoothly -- again, as long as there aren't a lot of apps open.

The speakers are awkwardly placed on the bottom edge if holding the tablet in portrait-orientation, so when switching to landscape to watch video, you end up slightly blocking one of the speakers with your palm. This might be a blessing in disguise, as the speakers themselves are unimpressive at best.

The Excite 7 features SRS WOW audio enhancements that can be used via headphones or the built-in stereo speakers. When turned on, the feature helps audio sound a bit more full, but, unfortunately, the dingy stereo speakers still produce flat sounding, tinny audio. The different movie, music, and voice modes did make an audible difference, but the enhancement couldn't overcome the tablet's poor quality speakers.

The 3.0-megapixel rear camera takes photos that look sharp enough on the 7-inch display, but appear dull in sharpness and color when seen on a higher resolution screen. Colors in the photos are washed out and the white balance settings appeared to have either exaggerated tones or do nothing to visibly enhance the photo.

Pictures taken in dim environments often appear full of noise and, with no focus options, blurry photos are very common. The panoramic option did a decent job at capturing and stitching an entire scene, granted it still resulted in drab colors and fuzzy focus.

On the front, the 0.3-megapixel camera gets the job done for video conferencing, but photos look as if there's some type of pencil-drawing-effect filter over it, which looks kinda cool to me, but if you want something less unintentionally artsy-fartsy, its dull, grainy, and over-contrasted results aren't as charming.

Anecdotally, the Toshiba Excite 7's battery life is pretty average. On a full charge, it lasted about a day with casual use, but I noticed the battery drained considerably faster when the brightness was cranked all the way up. Check back for the CNET Labs official battery test results.

Conclusion
When it comes to budget 7-inch tablets, $149 is the new $199, and the Toshiba Excite 7's $169 starting price misses the cut with an underwhelming experience spearheaded by lackluster performance, a dull screen, and plastic-y build quality.

The battle of the budget is getting fiercer and a 7-inch tablet with mediocre specs priced under $200, just won't cut it anymore. You can get more for less in the $139 Amazon Kindle Fire HD which features a better screen, or the $149 Dell Venue 7, which smoothly runs a pure version of Android Jelly Bean. However, an upgrade to a superior small tablet, like the Google Nexus 7 or Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7, isn't too far away.

Budget tablets are expected to compromise performance and design to meet their bargain prices, but every year the standard for what's expected from a budget tablet increases. Unfortunately, the Toshiba Excite 7 sacrifices too much in value while keeping its price a tad too high to be worthy of a purchase.