Difference Between Toshiba Excite X10 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Toshiba Excite X10 vs Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

CES 2012 is such a glamorous event. Most of the industry leading vendors are exhibitors there. Some other vendors who are trying to get in to the market also secure a place as an exhibitor. Thus, it becomes a complete blend of mature and new vendors trying to impress the hungers of consumers with their innovations. Looking at it in a broader perspective, this actually yields a good side; vendor’s being innovative, yet precautious, and on a bad side, innovators coming up with some completely useless designs. Fortunately the useless designs we had to witness at the CES has been very less in the mobile devices department, though not necessarily zero. The device we are going to talk about today certainly wasn’t in that category.

Toshiba Excite X10 is indeed a great tablet in its own way. Been the successor for Toshiba Thrive, it actually has a burden bestowed upon its head. Toshiba Thrive was more an unpopular tablet than a game changer for Toshiba. We, on the other hand, observe that Toshiba has more than made up for that with Excite X10, for the main complaint against Thrive has been taken care of. We will read more about what’s been corrected in the review to come, and we are going to compare it against Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which was released even before Toshiba Thrive, yet still stands to give a good competition to Toshiba Excite X10. You will understand the reasons why we declare that Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is still a fighter in the current market when we look at them individually.

Toshiba Excite X10

We’ve seen some pretty impressive tablets at the CES 2012, and Toshiba Excite X10 is one of them, of course, it isn’t on the elite lineup, but nonetheless, we are impressed. The 10.1 inch tablet has a LED backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels at 149ppi pixel density. The screen is of good quality, and we like the color reproduction of the panel. The resolution is top notch too, although with Asus and Acer hitting the 1920 x 1200 pixels, this one seems history. Nonetheless, we have to admit it’s a great resolution. It has 1.2GHz dual core processor on top of TI OMAP 4430 chipset with PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The setup is boosted by 1GB of RAM. Excite X10 runs on Android OS v3.2 Honeycomb while Toshiba promises an upgrade. We find that Honeycomb commands the resources well, but ICS must be the ideal choice. The UI looks clean, and there are some upgrades to the layout too, especially the media player has been upgraded with their own design and it’s rather neat and beautiful.

On the optics department, Toshiba Excite X10 comes with 5MP camera with autofocus and LED flash with geo tagging and the camera can capture 720p HD videos at 30 frames per second. The front facing camera can be used for video conferencing along with Bluetooth v2.1. Toshiba Excite is one of those tablets that defines it’s connectivity through Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n adapter enables it to connect to any hotspot that is available, and it also has DLNA to enable wireless streaming of rich media content. It has two storage options 16GB and 32GB, and since it has the microSD slot that can be used to expand the memory, we won’t complain. We have been talking about the core functions of the tablet, but let’s get back to what’s special in Toshiba Excite X10 as Toshiba promotes it. The Toshiba Excite is the thinnest tablet in the market as per their claim, and we have to go with that for the moment. It counts for really a light tablet as well scoring a thickness of 7.7mm and weight of 535g. The device comes in black, and the black plate has an expensive look since they have textured it with Magnesium Alloy. We were told that the battery can drive the tablet for a duration of 8 hours straight from a charge.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Galaxy Tab 10.1 is another successor of Galaxy family too. It was released to the market in July 2011 and at the time, was the best competition for Apple iPad 2. It comes in black and has a pleasing and expensive look with the desire to keep it in your hand. Galaxy Tab is even thinner than ViewPad 10e scoring a mere 8.6mm, which is awesome for a tablet PC. Galaxy Tab is also lightweight with a weight of 565g. It has a 10.1 inch PLS TFT Capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 and 149ppi pixel density. The screen is also reinforced with Corning Gorilla glass to make it scratch-resistant.

It comes with a 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 dual core processor on top of Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset and Nvidia ULP GeForce graphics unit, which tends to be more powerful than the PowerVR unit. The 1GB RAM is a due addition to this setup which is controlled by Android v3.2 Honeycomb and Samsung promises an upgrade to Android v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, as well. It comes with two storage options, 16/32GB without an option to expand the storage. Unfortunately, Samsung Galaxy Tab LTE version doesn’t come with GSM connectivity although it has CDMA connectivity. On the other hand, it has LTE 700 connectivity for super-fast internet and Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. Since it also supports Wi-Fi hotspot functionality, you can handsomely share your super speed internet with your friends. As mentioned above, been released In July and having LTE 700 connectivity certainly helped it a lot to gain the market share it has gained through this 5 months, and we have to say that Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a matured product you can rely on.

Samsung has included a 3.15MP camera with autofocus and LED flash, but this kind of seems inadequate for the tablet. Fortunately it can capture 720p HD videos @ 30 frames per second and for the delight of the video callers, it has a front camera of 2MP bundled together with Bluetooth v2.1. It comes with the normal sensor set for the Galaxy family and has a predicted battery life of 9 hours.

Conclusion

We can provide a conclusion depending on the hardware specifications Toshiba has listed officially, but we can’t actually comment about the performance because we didn’t get a chance to benchmark the tablet. On the other hand, we know for a fact that Samsung Galaxy Tablet 10.1 performs very well and is at the top of our benchmarks. So we will form our conclusion using the hardware specifications and taking the prior Toshiba user experience in to preference. The processor, memory combination is good and should result in seamless and smooth performance. For the short time we could get the tablet, it did impress us. Therefore, we reckon for any general use, it’ll be smooth. Even in the case of games, we can expect fine performance with the PowerVR SGX540 GPU. That been said, it is only fair to mention that Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is known to come to parallel these speculated performance, as well. However, there are some solid facts about Toshiba Excite X10 that we can assure you. It has better optics than Galaxy Tab 10.1, and it is also thinner and lighter than Galaxy. Although the difference in the screen panel wouldn’t be noticeable unless compared in parallel, Toshiba Excite does have a better panel. That’s about how Excite excels Galaxy, but the package also comes with rather steep price of $530, so the audience will have a second thought about tablet.