Toshiba has been in the Android
tablet game as long as anyone. This year, it’s $600 Excite Write has
all the fancy specs – a super high resolution 10-inch display, Nvidia
Tegra 4 processor, Harmon Kardon speakers – and adds still more on top
of that: a digitized pen. This is a direct challenge to Samsung’s Note
tablets and a play for students and the corporate set who still take
notes by hand and mark up PDFs.
The Excite Write offers one of the best pen/tablet writing
experiences for Android as well as smooth, speedy performance, but our
experience with the Write did come with some inconveniences.
Plain design, no stylus holder
The Excite Write can’t claim a distinctive design; rounded corners,
wide bezel, curved edges, textured plastic back, we’ve seen it all
before. This lack of flash doesn’t make for an ugly tablet. In fact, the
Write is comfortable to hold and not too heavy for its 10-inch size.
The biggest misstep is that there’s no integrated port for the stylus.
That means you’re going to lose it. And it’s a bulky, big stylus at
that. Without a place to attach or rest the pen, it’s more likely to be
lost.
Ports line one edge of the tablet, with MicroSD, Micro HDMI out, and
Micro USB hidden behind a port cover while the headphone jack and power
port remain exposed. For some reason Toshiba still insists on AC
adapters for charging instead of just using the Micro USB port like most
other manufacturers. To charge the Write you need a cord the size of
one you’d see on an Ultrabook. It’s bulky. Luckily, the Excite Write’s
battery life is good so you won’t have to carry the charger everywhere
with you.
The abundance of pre-loaded apps makes the tablet more useful, not less.
An 8-megapixel camera and flash sit on back as does a pair of Harmon
Kardon speakers. The placement means sound is directed away from the
listener, which isn’t great. Any small amount of background noise will
make the audio difficult to hear even at full volume. Plug headphones or
external speakers in and you’ll get a far better experience.
The 10.1-inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel display is great for reading thanks
to the pixel density. We didn’t have to zoom into magazine pages in
Zinio to comfortably read small fonts and HD YouTube videos look great.
The bright, color rich screen also boasts wide viewing angles.
As close to writing on paper as you can get
Toshiba has years of experience with digitized pens and tablets from its years of working with Windows,
so we had high expectations for the company’s Android effort. And from a
hardware perspective, the Excite Write and its companion TruPen are top
notch. The tip of the pen moves smoothly across the screen and the feel
of it is as close to pen on paper as you’re going to get with this type
of device. The TruPen itself is a good size and shape, just not as
weighty as most regular pens this thick. The lack of heft may throw you
off at first, but we got used to it quickly. In addition to the button
on the side, there’s an eraser button on the top of the pen. We were
never in danger of scratching the screen even though that button is hard
plastic.
The precision pen tip is excellent for writing and we filled dozens
of virtual pages with notes and scribbles. We never saw a lag between
our strokes and marks showing up on screen in Toshiba’s TruNote app or
the handwriting keyboard, and using the pen to play games like Bejeweled Blitz didn’t slow us down. In other note apps, like Papyrus,
the pen’s strokes lagged behind our own just enough to be noticeable, a
problem not unique to the Write. Sadly, there are no cool pen hovering
tricks like you’ll find on the Galaxy Note 8.0.
Palm rejection issues
One advantage of this type of stylus is good palm rejection, and the
TruPen does make that possible. There’s one snag: the bottom bar. There
are no physical buttons on the Excite Write so Jelly Bean’s bottom bar
with Home, Back, and Recent Apps is always around. Even when an app
ignores our palm resting on the screen, the bar sometimes doesn’t. Our
hand or arm often accidentally exited the application when the tip of
the pen got too far from the screen. To keep this from happening we
ended up covering that part of the screen with a cloth – not ideal.
The Excite Write and companion TruPen are top notch.
This problem isn’t unique to the Write. We also encountered it on
the Galaxy Note 10.1. It’s less of a problem on the Note 8.0. If your
arm accidentally activates those buttons, all you have to do is turn the
tablet upside down or to landscape. Getting around this issue on the
Write means changing how you position your hand (or using the hack we
did).
TruNote is less robust than Samsung’s S Note
You can’t make a pen-enabled tablet without also bundling a
note-taking app. Toshiba’s is called TruNote, and it contains some nice
features. The app can turn handwriting into editable text that is easily
exportable to other programs, and it can convert line drawings into
graphics for ThinkFree Office. That’s par for the course with most pen
tablets. TruNote goes one further and makes handwriting searchable so
you can find key words even if you don’t convert to text. We don’t like
that the app only accepts handwritten notes, no keyboard input. We
really don’t like that the text recognition and conversion only works in
portrait mode. And while the desktop-esque interface is cute, it’s not
very useful for organization. TruNote is ultimately less robust than S
Note for Samsung tablets and may have users seeking out third-party
options.
The final pen-enabled feature is a handwriting keyboard called Stylus
Mobile. With this you can use the pen to enter text in any app – just
choose this keyboard instead of the stock Android one in Settings. The
text entry area is only one line high and keeps you from entering a lot
of text speedily. It’s fast at recognizing words and doesn’t require
neat handwriting to work.
Camera is best as a scanner
The pictures produced by the 8-megapixel camera on the back of the
Excite Write didn’t impress us, particularly those taken in low or mixed
light. That’s not where this camera’s strength lies. Step over to the
TruCapture app and you can take pictures of printed text on paper or on a
whiteboard and get a good quality result. You don’t even need to take
the picture straight on – the advanced cropping tools will fix the skew.
The app is capable of reducing the glare on whiteboards and the digital
zoom is more helpful than we would have assumed thanks to good image
stabilization. From TruCapture you can export the images as JPEGs or
PDFs.
The 1.2-megapixel front camera does all right for video chats, just don’t expect a sharp, noise-free image.
Android 4.2 gets the job done
Toshiba doesn’t mess with the interface or functionality of Android
4.2.1 Jelly Bean. The only contributions from the company come in the
form of some extra settings and a ton of pre-loaded apps. To get started
with the Excite Write you don’t need to visit the Google Play store at
all unless it provides you joy. Still, we wish that Toshiba would add a
few interface tweaks to better take advantage of both the pen and the
pixel density. Samsung and Sony each have ways to utilize more of the
screen and multitask; we feel the loss of that customization here.
One particular area where we wished for some tweaking is the
keyboard. The one that comes with Jelly Bean is decent, but very basic.
And the inclusion of the handwriting keyboard needs a more up front
implementation. It should be integrated into the standard keyboard, much
like Samsung does on its Galaxy Note.
Toshiba’s in-house apps – Book Place, News Place, Apps Place, File
Manager, and Media Player – are mostly redundant and easily ignored if
you don’t need them. The inclusion of PrintHand, an app that connects to
cloud services and wireless printers (including Google Cloud Print
ones), is very useful, as is Evernote. The office suite Toshiba chose to
work with TruNote is ThinkFree Write. That’s unfortunate, since it’s
one of our least favorite Android office suites. This version does
nothing to change that opinion.
The rest of the games, media, and reading apps are well-curated.
Though we often complain about bloatware, the abundance of apps makes
the tablet more useful, not less.
Powerful specs and good battery life, but it runs hot
Expectations are high for tablets running on Nvidia’s new Tegra 4
platform. Packed with cores optimized for graphics, gaming, and raw
power, Tegra 4 is the perfect chip for a productivity machine with a
high-resolution display. In our experience, the performance lives up to
the hype. Everything from the graphic interface to switching apps to
playing high-end games ran smoothly and the 2GB of RAM no doubt aids in
the tablet’s multitasking prowess. It scored 12,373 on the Quadrant
benchmark, far above the Nexus 10 (4,500) and Sony Xperia Tablet Z
(7,640) to rise up to the level of the Galaxy S4 (12,000). This is just about the most powerful tablet we’ve used.
The left side got so hot while playing games that we had to set it aside to cool down.
However, taxing the Excite Write, even a little bit, caused it to
heat up uncomfortably. The left side got so hot while playing games that
we had to set it aside for a few minutes to cool down. When hot we also
noted a bit of lag in some apps, though not in the OS overall.
The tablet comes with 32GB of internal storage expandable via the
MicroSD card slot. The Wi-Fi radio inside is dual-band 802.11ac/a/b/g/n
and Bluetooth is the latest protocol, 4.0.
Battery life is rated for 10.5 hours of video playback. With heavy
mixed usage and the brightness turned all the way up, the Excite Write
battery lasted over 14 hours without a charge. Employing any battery
saving measures will make it possible to go a day or two without having
to charge it with on and off usage.
Conclusion
The Toshiba Excite Write is close to being a great tablet. Pen nerds
looking for a digital solution that feels right will find this device
tempting. Toshiba got pen control perfect. The display gets high marks,
too. And though the camera isn’t the best for taking pictures, it’s
useful in other important ways, like document scanning. However, we
can’t overlook how hot the Write gets, the lack of place to stash the
TruPen so it doesn’t get lost, or the missed opportunities to make
Android more useful for fans of handwriting. These drawbacks might be
overlooked if the tablet cost less. A device that costs $600 shouldn’t
have this many missteps.
If a good pen and tablet combo is what you’re after, the Galaxy Note 8.0 is a better choice right now.
Highs
- Bright, beautiful, HD screen
- Great pen experience
- Pre-loaded apps are well-curated
- Smooth, fast performance
- Long battery life
Lows
- No port or attachment for pen
- Tablet gets very hot when used heavily
- Requires AC adapter to charge
- Toshiba could have modified Android more for pens
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