Toshiba plans to launch three new 10-inch Android tablets next month

If you aren’t ASUS or Samsung, the Android tablet space may seem pretty unforgiving. Toshiba is one company that has learned that lesson all too well, having tried with its initial Thrive line of tablets and, more recently, with the Excite line. Toshiba apparently isn’t ready to give up on Excite just yet, though — according to Engadget, the company will clear its tablet line-up, replacing everything with three new Excite products: the Excite Pure, Excite Pro and Excite Write.

The Excite Pure is nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s a 10-inch tablet running Android 4.2 at a resolution of 1280 x 800, and it packs 16 GB of storage space. The processor, a Tegra 3, was impressive when it somehow squeaked into the Nexus 7 a year ago, and it’s still a lot of processor, but it’s no longer cutting edge. The Excite Pure will be priced at $300, and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares against a presumably cheaper and better-spec’d Nexus 7 refresh.

The Excite Pro and Excite Write tablets take performance and features up a few notches. The Pro and Write tabs are also 10-inch devices running Android 4.2, but these bump the resolution up to 2560 x 1600 — what those in Appleland refer to as “Retina.” The processor in both devices also gets an upgrade to the newer Tegra 4, both get an 8 megapixel rear camera, and memory in each jumps to 32 GB built-in.

You aren’t bound to that particular amount of storage, by the way. Thanks to SD cards slots on all of the Excite tablets, you can expand storage at a relatively inexpensive price.

The Excite Pro comes in at $500 — cue rant where I say it’s foolish for any Android tablet maker to charge as much as Apple — and the Excite Write comes in at $600. The Write shares much of the same hardware as its brother, the Pro, but also adds pen support through a Wacom digitizer — hence the additional cost. Toshiba will also be adding some of its own note-taking software for those who prefer the pen experience the Write provides.

Truth be told, it doesn’t seem like Toshiba learned its lesson, after all. On paper, none of these devices do a whole lot to grab your attention, and they’re priced a bit too high to compete even with high-quality Android devices, much less the iPad mini or Retina. We’ll have to see how things pan out once these actually hit the market next month, but I hope for Toshiba’s sake that the company looks long and hard at current offerings before putting out more products.