Hands on: Toshiba Excite X10 review

Toshiba Excite X10
Light, but not a lightweight

Anywhere you look at CES another company is announcing another tablet. But Toshiba has gone the distance and created something that has made us genuinely excited.

That's because the Toshiba Excite X10 is billed as the thinnest, lightest tablet on the market, and they didn't make many sacrifices.

You can check out TechRadar's Toshiba Excite X10 video below:

At just 7.7mm thick and 535 grams it's ridiculously thin and light. Strangely, holding it didn't give the sense that it was much lighter than, say, the iPad 2, but over time those 66 grams would probably make a considerable difference.

X10

The Excite X10 is ten-inches tall with a 1280 x 800 resolution. The straight magnesium alloy back of the X10 gives it the feeling of being impossibly thin.

X10

There's a strange groove in the X10 chassis that representatives said was a design aesthetic. We weren't entirely sold on it, as it felt a bit cheap and made us feel as if we could pull the tablet apart.

While the version we went hands on with was running Gingerbread, but Toshiba assured us it was fully compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich and would be running the update as soon as it was available.

X10

Its processor, the dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 1.2 GHz, should be able to handle Ice Cream Sandwich admirably.

But the bag of tricks doesn't end there. The X10 has a gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS capabilities, eCompass, ambient light sensors, ten finger multi-touch support, micro USB and micro HDMI ports, and a 2MP front-facing camera.

X10

Lighting wasn't ideal on the show floor, but our initial feeling was that both the 2MP front-facing camera and 5MP rear-facing camera (which has LED flash) were up to snuff. Unfortunately, all these features will cost you a bit.

The Excite X10 comes in two flavors, a $530 16GB version and $600 for the 32GB version. The Toshiba Excite X10 release date should be sometime in first quarter.

Online Editor

Nic is a former Online Editor at TechRadar in San Francisco. He started as a games journalist before becoming an editor at Mac|Life magazine. He holds a degree in English Literature and English Writing from Whitworth University.