Toshiba Excite Pure review

Today Toshiba has announced three new tablets: the Excite Pure, the Excite Pro and the Excite Write. They all share a very similar design, but Toshiba aims to follow in Samsung’s footsteps by offering a range of tablets to cater for every price range. Here are our hands-on impressions of the Excite Pure, which is the most basic tablet in the Excite range.

At first glance, the Pure looks very similar to Toshiba’s AT300se tablet. It’s a little slimmer, measuring 10.2mm thick, and marginally lighter, but its 600g weight still makes it feel quite substantial to hold. It certainly doesn’t look like a budget tablet, though, as the textured dot pattern on the rear feels much better to touch than glossy plastic and gives a good amount of grip.

The Pure has a 10.1in screen with a 1,280×800 resolution. The screen didn’t blow us away at the launch event, but the tablet’s Android 4.2.1 operating system looked sharp and crisp as we flicked through the home screens. Its ten-point touchscreen was also very responsive as we browsed the web.

The connections are all on the left hand side of the tablet. Along with a headphone jack and the volume control, there’s a microUSB port and a plastic flap that conceals a microSD card slot and a micro HDMI output for connecting the tablet up to an external display. The AT300se didn’t have any video outputs, so we were pleased to see this new addition. Rounding off the Excite Pure’s features are a 3-megapixel camera on the rear and a 1.2-megapixel camera on the front for video chat.

The Pure is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor and has 1GB of RAM. It won’t set the world alight with its speed, at least not compared to the Excite Pro and Excite Write’s newer Nvidia Tegra 4 processor, but it was certainly fast enough to run Android very smoothly. It completed our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 1,790ms, which is just a little slower than Sony’s Xperia Tablet Z, so it’s perfectly fast enough for web browsing.

We were impressed with the Excite Pure during our brief time with the device. It looks like it will cost around £249, which is quite competitive for a 10in tablet, but with only £100 standing between it and its far more advanced cousin, the Excite Pro, it could also mean it will end up being overlooked as both a budget tablet and a mid-range model.