Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Toshiba Laptop Battery
The guts of the Excite 10 have all the makings of a great Android tablet: quad-core Tegra 3, 1GB DDR3 RAM, full SD card slot, microHDMI out, microUSB, fantastic speakers, etc. How that translates into everyday usage, though, is a bit wishy-washy. When opening programs, there's a certain amount of lag on the Excite 10 that's not present on other Tegra 3 Android tablets. Similarly, I noticed a lot of hiccups when streaming videos on both Netflix and YouTube. The video would briefly pause for a second or two at sporadic intervals, regardless of which video or service I was using at the time. I've encountered this anomaly several times during my use with the Excite 10, so I definitely think it's an issue with the device itself, not the service in question.
For watching movies and listening to music, though, the Excite 10's speakers are outstanding... for a tablet. This is mostly due to an array of software tweaks incorporated by Toshiba, which I'll cover in detail in the 'Software' section of the review.
Despite its few hiccups here and there, the Excite 10 actually performs very well. Transitions are fluid, switching between apps is incredibly fast, and there's almost zero lag (aside from the aforementioned issue, which only happens occasionally).
One area where I'm not impressed, though, is battery such as Toshiba PA3357U-3BRL Battery , Toshiba PA3382U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3382U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3383U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3383U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3384U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3384U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3395U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3399U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3399U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3399U-2BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3399U-2BRS Battery life. It's... well, not good. In fact, I only got about 6.5 hours of screen-on time. That's Gmail, web browsing, typing up notes for this review with a Bluetooth keyboard, streaming music, and one episode of River Monsters on Netflix. Throw in some heavy gaming (like Shadowgun), and you'll see that drop below the six hour mark, which is beyond sub-par by today's standards. To be fair, I feel like this is likely due to the fact that Toshiba stuck a smaller battery in the unit to cut down on size and weight, as the Tegra 3 processor has proven time and time again to be extremely battery efficient.
Still, if you're not a heavy user, you can probably make it through a day with this device. If, however, you plan on using it for a full day of work/school, you may want to bring the charger along for the ride, which will take up at least half of your bag.
One really nice feature of the Excite 10 is that Toshiba decided to forego the microSD card slot in lieu of its full-size brother. This is perfect for anyone who uses full-size SD cards often, like photographers for example.