Toshiba Excite 7.7 Tablet Review: AMOLED in a Fun Size
by Dustin Sklavos on August 29, 2012 2:01 PM ESTBattery Life
Owing both to its AMOLED technology and just plain smaller display dimensions, the Toshiba Excite 7.7's battery life is pretty stellar for an Android tablet. That said, while we try to measure battery running time with the display set at ~200 nits, the shifting brightness and unreliable calibration readings makes this a much more difficult proposition. As a result I did something essentially unthinkable; I adjusted the brightness by eye.
My desktop monitors are all calibrated to 220 nits (I'm a little bit blind), so I used them as a comparison point for setting the brightness of the Excite 7.7 for battery testing. Even then it's still a ballpark setting for two reasons: the dynamic brightness, and the way AMOLED technology itself works. Dark colors (and blacks) draw less power than a bright colors or a white display do. So while I tested video playback on the Excite 7.7 using a video with the same bitrate, dimensions, and codec as the other guys do when testing their tablets, there's a chance the duller color palette of the horror movie (my horror movie) might have had a slight impact on the results. If you want to see the source material for yourself (shameless plug ahead), you can check it out here.
Even with having to eyeball the brightness and the potentially compromised color palette of the video played back, the results speak for themselves: the Excite 7.7 has excellent battery life. Even if you chopped a quarter of the running time off to create a worst case scenario, the Excite 7.7 would still be beating the comparably sized Kindle Fire handily and be roughly competitive with Google's excellent Nexus 7.
Subjective User Experience
If you come to AnandTech for objective product analysis, feel free to skim or skip this section. As someone who relies either on a smartphone or a netbook for most of his portable computing needs, the tablet presents an interesting alternative and I was curious to see how it would fit into my workflow and daily life. My impressions are...mixed.
As a smartphone user I've shied away from getting locked into Apple's closed ecosystem, and my experiences with Android have been less than stellar. Truth be told, I use a smartphone powered by Windows Phone 7.5; Microsoft's smartphone operating system is remarkably clean, functional, and snappy to use, and it's difficult to bog it down the way Android can very easily get. Visually I also find the spartan coloring and design to be more pleasing than Android or iOS, but I also tend to prefer more minimalistic approaches to aesthetics whenever possible. Why is this relevant?
Because I have my doubts about Android as a tablet OS. Android is very busy and not as intuitive as I'd like, and if Windows 8 or Windows RT are going to gain traction with consumers, Metro
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What killed the usability for me were two areas: the touchscreen keyboard and the lack of a true wireless data option. Microsoft's Surface and many other Windows 8/RT tablets are liable to fix the issue of the former, but the sluggish oligopoly that is the American wireless market is quickly turning into a boot on the throat of emerging technologies like tablets. Content consumption devices are only as good as their ability to provide content, but by being tethered to WiFi the tablet becomes more of a novelty. Unfortunately that's going to be the case for most users, Toshiba tablet or no, because wireless data plans for tablets are prohibitively expensive, especially when you're already dealing with paying the bill for your smartphone. All of this before you get into the offensively low bandwidth caps American wireless carriers have in place.
As far as smaller tablets go, I do quite like the Excite 7.7 and I've found it moderately useful for doing quick look-ups of things while I'm in front of the TV. It's much easier to pick up a tablet that's less than a pound than it is a three pound netbook. It's just not worth the price of admission, and for people commuting on public transportation in major metropolitan areas (for example, BART in the California bay area), the lack of wireless broadband is a killer. Nine times out of ten, I'm going to prefer my old-fashioned Kindle Keyboard and just read.
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fmcjw - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
I think constructive feedback is more helpful than your "just don't read it" attitude.The thing is, anything not written by Brian or Anand is pretty low standard stuff.
Disclaimers in a review are just verbose excuses for laziness or substandard content. If Brian did this review, in the comparison table in the "Storage" row, it won't just have 16GB or 8GB, but 16GB, 16GB+µSD, 16GB+µSDXC, etc.
solinear - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Honestly, there are too many reviews for some of these devices. As for the review quality - I don't think it's a bad review, but it's definitely not enthusiastic either way. They're not going "OMG, this is a bad device" or "OMG, this rocks"... the review is going "Um... I had to do this review, but I hate the OS and really just want to go back to using my Windows Phone and wait for Win8 tablets to come out". I might as well go to MacAddict expecting a fair review of Win8 and Android tablets as reading this one.For tablets and phones, I'd rather see a page long "highlights" review unless it's a review of an item that is seriously cool. Then once a quarter, see a more thorough review. Seeing the stats for all those devices in every single darned review for a tablet gets really old fast.
A nice quarterly spreadsheet that summarizes up the performance, memory, etc... of all the devices with their prices would be nice. Then I can come in here, look at the device, read the review of the various features and see if there are any deal breakers and make an informed purchase.
jiffylube1024 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
I think the AMOLED (not SAMOLED+?) display alone makes this tablet interesting. It would be interesting to see this thing in person and compare it to the Nexus 7.At 349g, it's basically the same weight as the N7 (340g) and you get a 20.7% screen area increase, which is not too shabby.
This tablet's got a 5mp rear camera and 2mp front camera - better than the N7's single 0.3 mp front camera (although cameras on tablets, aside from their usage in Skype and other video chatting programs, have always seemed unnecessary to me).
It's interesting (and unfortunate) to note that there's a proprietary charger for this device; HP, Blackberry and Google had no problems making micro USB chargers; why can't everyone else?
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The pricing for this Toshiba tablet does leave something to be desired; even in the $399-429 price range, clearly the 16GB Nexus 7 at $249 is a better buy.
Does this Toshiba tablet even come with Android 4.1? The Nexus, as a Google flagship, will be one of the first devices to get subsequent Android updates in a timely fashion. Bit players like these are not at all guaranteed to be updated.
nafhan - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
"although cameras on tablets, aside from their usage in Skype and other video chatting programs, have always seemed unnecessary to me"I completely agree with this statement.... which is why I was somewhat shocked when I went to an aquarium a few weeks ago and saw quite a few people walking around taking pictures with iPads. To me, this makes no sense, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Origin64 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Tablets in general are about as interesting as a funeral for someone I didn't know. Everybody's getting all emotional and I can't seem to care.But seriously, there just isn't much innovation in tablet-land right now. We can expect something new when win8 hits in a few months, and significant android price-drops after that. The focus will shift from being as fast as possible to being as cheap as possible while remaining competitive performance-wise. ARM just can't keep up to an i5, so why even bother to try?
The reviewer also raises an interesting point in that he thinks Android isn't perfect for tablets. Too few people have commented on what I also see as careless GUI design in some tablets. On phones it's simple, you've got notifications at the top and buttons down below. Same for the Nexus 7 (at least in portrait) The way the buttons and notifications are placed on this tablet just seems less intuitive to me.
The icons also appear too small, especially on this one. A 6x6 grid on 7"?
pandemonium - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Because reviews should be full of sparkly vampires, pop-tart rainbow fliers, and lots of campy one-liners?medi01 - Saturday, September 1, 2012 - link
This reads as a funeral because of, cough, level of "journalizm" at anand, cough...AMOLED screen doesn't even get color gamut benchmarks eh? GL benchmark is all we care about? Seriously?
Article image is showing GREY screen, seriously?
You suck guys...
Jenaii - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
that is right, the tablet market is targeting high performance tablet but that doesn't mean this tablet is out you may check the further review @ http://toshiba-tablet.com/Jenaii - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
that is right, the tablet market is targeting high performance tablet but that doesn't mean this tablet is out you may check the further review @ http://toshiba-tablet.com/guidryp - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
OLED screens are good on power until they display bright screen colors, especially white, when they draw more than LCDs.I suspect the dynamic control is really about keeping power usage down. They brighter the screen colors, the more power it draws and the more dimming that kicks in to curtail that power draw.
If it was just about aesthetics, it would probably be easy to disable.
I wonder if the Samsung OLED tablet with this screen does the same thing?