Event Coverage

Hands-on: Toshiba's New Products for 2013

By Leo Boon Yeow & Kenny Yeo - 12 Jun 2013

Tablets, External Storage and USB Monitor

Excite Pure and Write

The Toshiba Excite Write is a 10.1-inch tablet with a high resolution display, a Wacom technology digitizer and runs on the latest NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor.

The Toshiba Excite Pure and Write tablets that Toshiba showcased at the event, are 10.1-inch Android tablets. The Excite Pure tablet is positioned as an affordable companion device, while the Excite Write is a more premium product. Looks and build quality-wise, they are exactly the same. Both have plastic chassis with textured finishes to keep the price and weight of the devices down, but they also feel quite sturdy thanks to the stiffness of the plastic used.

The key difference between the Write and the Pure tablets, is under the hood. The Write uses a much newer NVIDIA Tegra 4 quad-core mobile processor, which offers more powerful and is more energy efficient than the older (but still capable) Tegra 3 mobile processor. The Write also has a much higher resolution display (2560 x 1600, 300+ ppi), which we found to be absolutely mesmerizing. And if that wasn't enough, the Write also comes with a Wacom technology digitizer which supports 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity allowing users to write and doodle on the tablet. We also found the digitizer to be highly responsive.

Another plus point about the Write is that it is fitted with Harman Kardon speakers. Compared to the Excite Pure, we found that the sound from the Excite Write is much louder and clearer. This means that users are able to enjoy movies and music alone, without the need for plugging in headphones. 

The Excite Write has quite a number of connectivity options like a micro HDMI port, a SIM slot and a micro SD slot hidden under a flap on the right side of the device.

Canvio Connect

The Canvio Connect comes with Pogoplug software that lets you access files on your system or Canvio Connect drive wirelessly.

The Canvio Connect is Toshiba’s new portable external hard drive for 2013. The Canvio Connect will be offered in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and will come in five colors - blue, white, silver, red and black. Like its predecessors, the drives will come bundled with NTI Backup Now EZ for easy backups and cloning. New to the Canvio Connect is the inclusion of the Pogoplug software, which lets users access files on their systems or Canvio drive wirelessly on their smartphones and tablets. Every drive also comes with free 10GB of cloud storage.

USB Mobile LED Monitor

The USB Mobile LED Monitor requires only a single USB port to work.

Apart from notebooks and tablets, Toshiba also released a couple of nifty accessories such as the USB Mobile LED Monitor. As its name suggests, it is a mobile display that is powered and driven directly and solely from a USB port - no need for additional power source. The display sports a resolution of 1366 x 768 and is 15.6-inches large. It weighs slightly under 1.4kg and handles like a typical notebook. It can be used with both USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports and requires users to install a special software for the monitor to work. At this time, the USB Mobile LED Monitor is only compatible with Windows systems. Based on our hands-on with the USB Mobile LED Monitor, we found it to work fluidly with hardly any lag in our inputs and it could also play video clips easily.

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