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Toshiba Excite 10 LE, the world’s thinnest 10-inch tablet, reviewed

In the race for the thinnest, lightest tablet on the market, Toshiba has come out with the Excite 10 LE, which it touts as "the world's thinnest 10-inch tablet." At 7.7 millimeters thick, it certainly is impressively skinny, nearly two full millimeters thinner than the new iPad and almost one millimeter thinner than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

The Toshiba Excite LE 10 operates on Android's Honeycomb 3.2 platform and will be able to upgrade to Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, sometime in April. Weighing only 1.13 pounds (535 grams), it's a light tablet that's easy to take along without weighing down a bag. The tablet comes with a 16GB hard drive, built-in stereo speakers, front and rear facing cameras and is Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled. It also boasts micro-USB and HDMI ports, as well as micro-SD slots, making it easier to connect with other devices.

I was recently able to go hands-on with the Excite 10 LE and found it to be a pretty solid all around tablet. That's impressive, considering "solid" is not a word I was expecting to use to describe what is referred to as a "wafer-thin" tablet.

The Excite 10 LE had consistently fast performance, whether it was downloading apps, opening and running those apps, or starting up. I never felt like I was waiting an unreasonably long time to get things done.

I was much less impressed with the Excite 10 LE's battery life. Battery, sadly, seems to be one of those things compromised in many of the new tablets hitting the market, just look at the controversy over the new iPad's battery life. According to the tablet's user guide, it takes six hours of charge to get eight hours of battery life. Remembering to charge the battery overnight is an absolute necessity because if, like me, you forget and try to charge it for an hour before heading off to work, chances are you won't be playing Angry Birds on your commute home. Eight hours is a good length of battery life for a tablet, but it is frustrating to wait almost as long to get it charged.

The charger for Toshiba's Excite 10 LE is a large proprietary connection that plugs in at the base of the device's horizontal edge. The other end can plug into a wall charger adapter or your computer. You can also charge using the tablet's micro-USB port, although this is an even slower option.

When I did have it up and running, however, the tablet performed very well. I used it primarily for playing Angry Birds Space and reading books using the Kobo app. Both the game and colour books looked good on the screen. The touch screen had fast response time, without any lag while playing the game or flipping book pages.

Finally, while everyone likes to say that looks don't matter, when it comes to technology, they do. The Toshiba Excite 10 LE is svelte, true, but I didn't find its overall look very appealing, at least in comparison to one of Toshiba's other tablets, the Thrive. Instead of the Thrive's sleek black and textured back, Toshiba has opted for a gunmetal look, which I personally did not love.

To get the necessary components into the incredibly thin form-factor, Toshiba has made the Excite 10 LE quite angular. That doesn't make it as comfortable to hold, but because of its lightness, this isn't as much of an issue as it could have been. Toshiba has also compressed all the buttons on the sides and taken away any clear markings of what they are in order to fit everything in. This makes navigating the side buttons a little challenging, especially when you're just getting acquainted with the device. It does make the tablet look much more streamline and once you've used all the buttons a few times, knowing which button does what is no longer an issue.

The Toshiba Excite 10 LE is available now starting at $549 MSRP.