Another reason to stay clear: You'll be paying a little extra for the 16GB version: $530, versus $499 for the 16GB . (For 32GB, you'll pay $600--the same price as Apple's iPad, but $100 more than Asus charges for its same-capacity--and better-performing--.)

Make no mistake about the engineering significance of Toshiba's Excite 10 LE: Constructed of magnesium alloy, the tablet feels noticeably lighter than competing models, including the close-in-weight (1.23 pounds). The Excite 10 LE was well balanced in the hand, and felt easy to hold one-handed in the vertical or portrait orientation, a common way of holding a tablet for reading books, magazines, and the like. No fewer than a dozen editors around the office handled the Excite, and all preferred the weight of the Excite over that of the Apple iPad 2, the current iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, or the Asus Transformer Prime.

The slim design does come with some trade-offs in physical construction. For one thing, the tablet is squared off around the bottom edges, which means that the Excite lacks the comfy, smooth tapering found on the iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and the Asus Transformer Prime. For another, the edges of the tablet have some give and some gaps, so that they actually flex away from the Gorilla Glass screen. While I wouldn't go so far as to say it feels as if it would snap in use, I wouldn't want to toss it into a jammed backpack and put any serious stress on it; an iPad could withstand that, but the Excite does not feel as if it would.

A few more design gripes, and one plus: The plus is that the Excite conveniently puts all of its ports--including microUSB (with support for USB On-the-Go, an unusual find), micro-HDMI, and microSD--in a row, along the left-hand side in landscape orientation. Above those ports sits the awkwardly-placed headphone jack. And the slim, hard-plastic buttons for power, volume, and rotation lock--running along the top of the tablet when you hold it in landscape mode--lack distinction and are awkward to adjust, which makes them decidedly annoying to use. Finally, Toshiba continues to rely on a bulky proprietary charging cable that plugs into the centrally located dock connector (and jacks into the USB brick for power). Yet, oddly, you don't use this cable to transfer data directly to the tablet; for that task, you'll need a microUSB cable.