When I attended IFA in Berlin in September and CEATEC in Tokyo in October, one of my favorite products at both shows was the same item: Toshiba’s 10″ tablet. But back then, Toshiba wasn’t saying anything about plans to bring it to the U.S.

Now it is. In this country, the tablet will be known as the Excite X10, and Toshiba says it will show up in “mid-Q1 2012″. (I guess that most likely means February.) It’s one of the company’s major announcements at CES, which is beginning to get underway in Las Vegas even though the show floor doesn’t open until Tuesday.

Toshiba says that the X10 is the thinnest 10″ tablet in the world–and it’s the only Android tablet I’ve seen that’s on a par with the iPad 2 in terms of pure industrial-design panache. In person, it looks nicer and is less of an iPad wannabe than it looks like in the above picture–the magnesium-alloy case has curvier corners than the iPad, and an indentation that runs around the edge. It weighs 1.18 pounds and is .3″ thick.

In terms of specs, the Excite has the goodies you might expect in a high-end Android tablet, including a 16:10 10.1″ display 1280-by-800 resolution and Corning Gorilla Glass, a 1.2-GHz TI OMAP dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a MicroSD slot, Micro-HDMI and Micro-USB ports, a 2-megapixel camera on the front and a 5-megapixel one on the rear, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Judged on pure hardware appeal, the Excite looks like a winner; as usual, with Android tablets, though, the software side is a stickier matter. Toshiba’s press release says the Excite has “the latest Android technology,” but when I got a sneak peek at the tablet recently, Toshiba representatives told me that they weren’t yet positive whether it would ship with Honeycomb 3.2 or Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0. If it goes out the door with Honeycomb, they said, it will get Ice Cream Sandwich as soon as possible.

Toshiba will release two models of the Excite: a 16GB one for $529 and a 32GB one for $599. The first version is $30 more than an 16GB iPad 2, and the second one is the same price as a 32GB iPad 2. That’s steep, especially given that the prices of other Android tablets have started to tumble. (Last week, Sony knocked its Tablet S down to $400.)

Toshiba does have a 10.1″ tablet in the Sony’s price range, though: Its 10.1″ Thrive, which loses the Excite’s sex appeal but gains a removable battery and full size ports, remains on the market at $380. So does the 7″ Thrive which I recently reviewed. Toshiba plans to approach the tablet business much like it does the laptop business, with multiple product lines with different priorities and price points.

If I knew I wanted an Android tablet, the Excite X10 would certainly be on my list of contenders; if price wasn’t a big issue, it might even be at the top of it. (I’d want to see reviews with battery-test results before I plunked down my money, however.)

But Toshiba, like all makers of Android tablets, is still hobbled by the fact that Google’s software isn’t yet an inspiring tablet operating system, and it’s way too short on top-notch tablet apps. That’s why the question “Why should I buy this instead of an iPad?” is still so difficult for Android tablets to answer convincingly. Even an attractive one like the Excite X10.

The best way to convey what it’s like is to share some of the photos I snapped. So here we go.

Sony’s booth was home to a super-fancy show featuring its two new tablets.

There were also long lines at its booth for demos of its new 3D virtual-home-theater headset.

There were certainly plenty of 3D TVs at the show, but they weren’t the center of attraction they’ve been at other recent electronics shows. But folks lined up for demos of super-high-resolution HDTV, such as this crowd at the Sharp booth. (The lady in front is demoing how surprisingly lightweight Sharp HDTVs are.)

In Japan, people still like mimes in a wholly non-ironic way. This one’s also demonstrating how portable Sharp HDTVs are, by toting one around like a suitcase.

Maybe the single biggest theme at the show was energy, and the conservation thereof–a fact clearly spurred in part by Japan’s reaction to its earthquake and the power outages that stemmed from it. Here’s a demo at Panasonic’s booth of a gas pump-like charging station for electric cars.

Just as Ford tends to have a higher profile at U.S. electronics shows than other car companies, Nissan seemed to be everywhere at CEATEC. Here’s a tiny concept electric car that makes a Smart Car look an H2.

Nissan also had a Leaf electric car that doubled as a backup battery for a home on stilts.

The Japanese love their vending machines. This one happens to be solar-powered.

The Wireless Power Consortium had an entire booth of products that use its Qi inductive charging standard to charge up gadgets without wires–including this table.

Intel was one of the few non-Japanese companies with a major presence, including a bunch of intriguing demos. This one involved online shopping, with a green T-shirt that serves as a green screen–allowing you to try out different tops from home.

More Intel: On-the-fly special effects give the lady in the boxy hat different on-screen heads.

Also at Intel, an attendee tries on a bionic arm.

Speaking of Intel, there were several computers based on its Dynabook platform for MacBook Air-like thin Windows machines, including this Toshiba.

Mitsubishi had a neat demo of a giant half-sphere electronic sign made out of gazillions of OLED displays.

At first, I wasn’t positive what this was–but I believe it’s some sort of TV satellite dish. Even if it isn’t, I like it.

I’ll bet that Toshiba didn’t absolutely need to have a human being holding up that tiny sign, which says “Regza,” a Toshiba sub-brand…

In Japan, Hitachi has a sub-brand–at least I think that’s what it is–called Wooo. It’s fun to say!

Yes, this car has giant ears.

Cute!

A live concert on the show floor.

We western journalists who traveled to the show also took a field trip to the astounding Yodobashi Camera in the Akihabara district–a camera/computer/phone/gadget/watch accessory store that just goes on forever and ever. And then a bit beyond that. (Check out the photo below and you’ll see a Tower Records sign–they still have them in Tokyo, and Yodobashi’s CD section is one.) It’s only one of scads of electronics stores in Akihabara, from other behemoths to tiny storefronts.

More news to come in a further couple of posts.

[Full disclosure: I was part of a keynote panel at the show, and CEATEC covered my airfare and hotel.]

I keep thinking that some company is going to release a 7″ tablet that’s nicely done and a big hit, proving that there’s a market for a device that’s a lot bigger than a smartphone but a lot smaller than an iPad. So far it hasn’t happened. But the 7″ tablets keep coming, and today Toshiba gave me a peek at the Thrive 7″ Tablet, which it plans to release in December.

The Thrive 7″ is very much a junior-sized edition of Toshiba’s 10.1″ Thrive, which is a tablet that’s unafraid to be kinda PC-like. It packs an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and runs Android Honeycomb 3.2. And even though it will come with Wi-Fi but (at least at first) no wireless broadband options, it’s got more connectivity options than your average tablet, including Mini HDMI and Mini USB ports and a Micro SD slot.

The tablet’s outstanding feature may be its 1280-by-800 display, an impressively high pixel density for a device this small. (Samsung’s original 7″ Galaxy Tab and RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, two other prominent 7″ tablets, have 1024-by-600 screens.) It looked crisp and beautiful on the unit Toshiba showed off to me.

Unlike the bigger Thrive, this one doesn’t have a swappable battery, but it retains the chunky dimensions that scream “Pre iPad 2 era.” It’s .47″ thick, compared to .34″ for the iPad 2. (Earlier this month at IFA in Berlin, Toshiba demoed a 10.1 tablet that’s only .303″ thick, but it hasn’t said anything about bringing it to the United States.)

Toshiba hasn’t announced how much it’ll charge for the small Thrive, but it’ll presumably go for meaningfully less than the 10.1″ model, which now starts at $379.99. I can understand why it hasn’t set pricing yet: In tablet years, December is still a long ways off–especially with Amazon about to announce a 7″ tablet of its own. (Rumored prices for that one: $250 or $300, possibly bundled with Amazon Prime membership.)

At this point, the biggest problem with 7″ tablets isn’t that they’re unpopular; it’s that no tablet that isn’t an iPad has caught on. And the single biggest problem for non-iPad tablets is that app developers are continuing to take a wait-and-see attitude on Android tablets. It’s going to be way more easy to get excited by 7″ Android tablets when–make that if–it’s not a pleasant surprise to learn that an interesting app is available in a version designed with them in mind.

Meanwhile, if you’ve already decided you’re in the market for a 7″ tablet, the Thrive looks like it’ll deserve a spot on your list of contenders–especially if the nice screen sounds appealing and you don’t insist on owning something with a whisper-thin profile. And I hope that by the time Toshiba ships, it turns out that it sports not Android 3.2 but Ice Cream Sandwich, the major Android upgrade that should arrive before the Thrive does.

Last year, I attended the IFA consumer-electronics megaconference in Berlin. The exhibitions of the big manufacturers were utterly dominated by 3D TVs. All that blurry 3D hurt my eyeballs, put me in a bad mood, and prompted this rant.

This year, I’m back in Berlin for IFA. There’s still scads of 3D, but it’s not quite as omnipresent as last year. Whether companies are losing interest or simply recalibrating their expectations to something more in line with consumers’ level of interest in this stuff, I’m not sure.

Is 2011 3D TV better than 2010 3D TV? Yes, at least a tad. Last year, the most pleasing 3D I saw was at Panasonic’s booth; this year, their demos struck me as being even a little better. (I like to make fun of the demonstation shown at the top of the post, but the displays showing 3D TV versions of the performing ladies were some of the crispest active-shutter 3D I’ve seen.)

I also liked LG’s huge booth, which was almost entirely devoted to passive 3D TV, a technology that’s just starting to give active-shutter serious competition. Passive 3D uses cheap glasses like the ones at movie theaters, not the unaffordable electronic ones required for active 3D. To my eyes, the best LG sets delivered picture qualiy in the same ballpark as decent active-shutter sets. And when an LG hostess saw that I wear eyeglasses, she handed me clip-on 3D lenses rather than glasses–and boy, they practically brought tears of joy to my eyes. For the first time in my life, I was able to see 3D without forcing one set of glasses over my own glasses. Much better. (Movie theaters back home in the U.S.: Get these clip-ons!)

In theory, the show’s biggest 3D news was probably Toshiba’s launch of the 55-inch ZL2, its first big set based on the glassses-free technology I saw in experimental form back at CES in January. The technology has improved since then, but you could tell that it requires a controlled environment: Toshiba showed it to only three attendees at a time, on seating squished up right in front of the set in a darkened room. Even then, most of the stuff we saw was distressingly gritty-looking.

(Did I mention that the ZL2 will cost 8000 Euros, or about $11,500?)

I came away from all this feeling like the people most excited by 3D TV are the ones trying to sell it to consumers. Even at its best, it adds severe image defects: blurriness, graininess, dimness, or some combination thereof. It’s still really a two-and-a-half dimensional effect that doesn’t actually make anything look more like real life. It remains most impressive for gimmicky moments–basseballs coming right at you, people inexplicably throwing buckets of water at the camera–that exist only to show off 3D.

My best guess is that 3D is going to rapidly became something that’s just there. It’ll be built into your next TV, won’t cost anything extra, and will be available if you want it and invisibile if you don’t. I hope it continues to improve, but I don’t expect any gigantic breakthroughs that make the experience radically better.

For now, I think that good 2D HD gives an effect that’s much, much closer to real life than any 3D. If all we had was 3D and 2D was invented in 2011, we’d regarded it as a breakthrough.

[Disclaimer: I spoke at an IFA panel, and the conference organizers covered the cost of my travel.]

The Toshiba technology uses a lenticular screen–one capable of showing two slightly different images at once, which your eyes fuse into a 3D effect. The dimensionality I saw during the demo was a bit like what you get on the Nintendo 3DS: pretty darn grainy, but with a strong 3D effect. Even more than 3D that involves funny goggles, glasses-free 3D tends to have a sweet spot–you want to look at it from one particular position–but Toshiba cleverly uses the Qosmio’s Webcam to track your face and optimize the 3D appropriately.

Glasses-free 3D laptops aren’t a new idea–Sharp had one back in 2004 that attracted a fair amount of attention and then kind of vanished. (That wasn’t surprising: the 3D hurt my eyeballs, and there was no available 3D content to speak of at the time.)

I suspect that Toshiba thinks this Qosmio will be a specialty model of interest to a smallish number of gadget fans, not a landmark product. It can play 3D Blu-Rays and convert standard movies into a fake 3D effect, but it seems unlikely that there are teeming masses of people who will want to sit through entire movies in Toshiba’s 3D effect just yet.

Still, I’m glad the company is investing energy in specs-free 3D (it’s also demonstrated a no-glasses 3D HDTV).  If 3D ever gets great–I’m not holding my breath–it’s going to be 3D that looks fabulous and doesn’t require glasses. And we won’t get there unless companies like Toshiba attempt to make it happen. What do you think the odds are that it’ll arrive in, oh, the next decade?

Toshiba wasn’t quite ready to share the full skinny on its Android Honeycomb tablet, which it first demoed back at CES in January. But Engadget managed to get its hands on the details, and rather than ignoring or denying the leak, Toshiba is fessing up earlier than it had planned.

The tablet will be known as the Thrive, and it’ll start at $429 for an 8GB, Wi-Fi-only version. As a child of the pre-iPad 2 era, it weighs in at a somewhat heavy 1.6 pounds and is on the thick side. But it uses its edge to good effect, with two full-size USB ports, HDMI, and an SD slot, making it feel a bit like a PC. (Makes sense for a tablet from Toshiba, no?)

The Thrive has a 10.1″ screen, the expected cameras front and back, and an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and runs Android Honeycomb 3.1. It’ll hit Best Buy, Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot, RadioShack, and Amazon.com in mid-July.

Toshiba's Portégé R830

When people ask me for recommendations about highly portable Windows notebooks, I’m quick to mention Toshiba’s Portégé R700–a reasonably-priced three-pounder that has a 13.3″ screen and even manages to pack a DVD burner into its trim, good-looking case. Today, Toshiba is announcing the R700′s successor–as well as two larger notebooks and a unique portable display. The company recently gave me a preview of its new wares.

The R700′s successor is called the Portégé R830, and it’s not a radical departure. Unlike netbooks and thin-and-lights that use low-power chips, the 3.1-lb machine is based on Intel’s more powerful new second-generation Core 2 Duo processor, aka Sandy Bridge. (Toshiba says that its air-cooling technology lets it pack the more potent CPU into the Portégé’s case without fear of overheating.) One of the USB ports is now a 3.0 one; the other is 2.0, but offers Toshiba’s Sleep-and-Charge feature, which lets you charge a device such as your phone even when the computer is otherwise powered down. Toshiba rates battery life at up to eleven hours with solid-state storage, a figure which, like all laptop battery claims, is probably on the optimistic side.

Like the R700, the R830 has a magnesium-alloy case with a honeycomb design–ie, strategically-placed holes–for lightweight rigidity; it doesn’t match the luxe feel of Apple’s aluminum unibody MacBook designs, but its quite nice.

Once again, Toshiba is offering this Portégé in two versions. The business-oriented R830 starts at $1049 (more with faster Core 2 Duos and solid-state storage), has an ExpressCard slot, and can be connected to a docking station. The slightly less fancy $888.99 R835 is designed for consumers: it doesn’t have the slot, can’t be docked, and has a one-year warranty instead of a three-year one, but adds Intel’s Wireless Display 2.0 feature for cable-free connections to HDTVs.

Toshiba’s other new models are in its full-strength, corporate-focused Tecra line–but their model names, the Tecra R840 and Tecra R850, are intended to indicate that they’re closer kins to the new Portégé than previous Tecras have been to its predecessor. The R840 is a 14″ notebook and the R850 is a 15.6″ one; while they’re not thin-and-lights and have beefy components such as 7200rpm hard drives, they are sleeker than the models they replace. (For instance, Toshiba says that the R840 is approximately 25 percent thinner and 20 percent lighter than the Tecra M11.) Like the Portégé, they use honeycomb case designs, but with fiberglass-reinforced materials rather than magnesium alloy. They offer second-generation Core 2 Duo processors with optional AMD Radeon discrete graphics with 1GB of DDR3 RAM.

The R840 starts at $899; the R850 starts at $879. (Yes, the larger model is $20 cheaper.)

Toshiba is also launching an intriguing laptop accessory: a Mobile Monitor that makes the venerable concept of adding a second display to your computer portable. It’s a 14″ screen that’s one inch thick and weighs three pounds, and it connects to notebooks–Toshiba and non-Toshiba alike–through a USB cable that provides both the image and power. (You can plug it into the wall for a brighter image.) It comes in a case which, like many iPad cases, unfolds into a stand that props the display into an upright orientation.

The Mobile Monitor is a niche product, but it looks quite well done and the $199.99 price is reasonable; it could be cool for serious road warriors who want a two-screen setup, as well as folks who do presentations and who don’t want to make everybody crowd around their notebook’s screen. It’s certainly a lot less weird than the various laptops with two built-in screens that have come and gone over the years.

But I am sort of intrigued by 3D that doesn’t require glasses. And at a pre-CES party tonight here in Las Vegas, Toshiba was showing a l56-inch flat-screen TV and a laptop which do 3D, no funny goggles required. The two devices use lenticular displays, just like the little picture of Pinocchio I owned when I was three. (Lenticular video screens are also nothing new, though all the ones I’ve seen until now have been blurry and unappealing.)

What Toshiba was conducting was a technology demo–it’s not claiming it’s come up with anything that’s ready for prime time, and it hasn’t announced any products. Which is good, because the tech needs more work: You have to be very precise about the angle at which you look at the screen. Even if you get that right, the imagery has issues. The pictures I saw looked grainy. and the 3D effect came and went. (Toshiba only seemed to be using video-game clips in its demos, which I took as a tacit acknowledgment that you don’t want to watch a movie on one of these screen just yet.

But you know what? I’ve seen 3D that required glasses that was worse than what Toshiba showed, and the very best 3D TVs and notebooks I’ve seen haven’t been that much better. Until now, I’ve always assumed that good no-glasses 3D was an impossible dream; for now, at least, I’m choosing to believe that Toshiba might get this technology to the point where there’s no point in bothering with technologies that make you don spectacles. And hey, I’m in no rush–I wonder how good this stuff could get by, say, 2015?

[NOTE: One of the problems with writing about 3D is there's no way to show what you're talking about. So I didn't even try to take photos of Toshiba's devices tonight. I swiped the image above from Toshiba's Web site--it depicts a standard glasses-required Toshiba 3D TV. Companies that sell 3D TVs have the same problem we writers do, and almost always end up depicting fantasy scenes with stuff flying out of the screen that look nothing like real 3D TVs. I feel like they all need disclaimers: "Warning--it's nowhere near this good!"]

One of the things that will define this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is that it’s the first one of the iPad era–Steve Jobs having unveiled Apple’s tablet two weeks after last year’s CES. And since most of Apple’s competitors have been slow to come up with iPad-like tablets of their own, CES 2011 is going to feature the debuts of iPad rivals by the boatload.

One of them will be from Toshiba. The company isn’t ready to start shipping anything just yet. (It cheerfully admits that it likes to take its time and do its best to ship a more refined product rather than rushing into new markets.) But it’s released some details about an unnamed, unpriced tablet which it intends to ship in the first half of this year.

The company briefed me recently on its plans, and showed me a non-working prototype. (It was, as you might be able to guess about a Toshiba product, pleasant-looking but relatively conservative.) Writing about a tablet without seeing or using its software is a little like judging a car without driving it or even sitting inside it–specs can only tell you so much. But the Toshiba tablet’s specs do look good. It has:

A 10.1″ display. Between Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, it looked for a while like Apple’s rivals might be concluding that relatively tiny 7″ tablets were best equipped to do battle with the iPad. Toshiba. however, is building a tablet with a screen that’s a skosh larger than the 9.7″ display on the iPad. Its resolution is higher, too: 1280-by-800 vs. the iPad’s 1024-by-768. (The Toshiba will weigh 1.5 pounds, compared to 1.5 pounds for the iPad and slightly over 13 oz. for the Galaxy.)

Android’s tablet-friendly “Gingerbread” release. With Flash support and various Toshiba-specific features such as a Toshiba app store and a Toshiba e-book store.

Cameras front (2 megapixels) and back (5 megapixels). They’re pretty much a standard feature on every tablet that isn’t the iPad (and the odds seem high that they’ll be on the next iPad as well).

A dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. Nvidia’s mobile platform looks cool, but other than Microsoft’s Zune HD and (um) its Kin smartphones, it hasn’t shown up in many high-profile products yet. Toshiba’s tablet could be its flagship.

An HDMI port and an SD slot. Along with a Mini-USB connector and a dock connector, 802.11n, Bluetooth, and GPS.

A removable battery. The prototype tablet I saw was reasonably thin–.6″– but you can pop the back cover off and replace the battery.

By the time CES wraps up, we should have lots more details on lots more tablets–including ones from Motorola and Vizio and possibly Lenovo, HP, and whatever companies Microsoft has lined up for the announcement it’s expected to make during Steve Ballmer’s Wednesday keynote.  I’ll try to see as many as possible in person at the show. You particularly excited about any of them?

Now 3D aside, the picture quality from these televisions are top notch from what I saw. They include Toshiba’s ClearFrame technology which prevents some of the loss of clarity in fast moving pictures that plague your everyday LCD set, and 1080p resolution. The set also includes built in Wi-Fi, and features Yahoo Connected TV technology.

Two sizes are available, a 46 and 55 inch model, which would retail for $2,599 and $3,299 respectively. The company also includes a lower end version without 3D in the same sizes, at prices of $2,299 and $2,799. The glasses would be sold separately which run about $170 a piece.

As you can see, the cost of 3D in the living room is really still prohibitively expensive. Toshiba tells me that they eventually will bundle these glasses with the television — but not for the foreseeable future. That probably means “we won’t do it until somebody else does.”

Like I said at the beginning, I don’t see the point — and until this technology is perfected and the 3D is much more impressive, I don’t think many consumers will either. Maybe one of our readers can convince me that this isn’t just a fad.

Along with the 3D TVs comes Toshiba’s first 3D-capable Blu-ray player, the BDX-3000, which will retail for $250 (Isn’t it weird to say Toshiba and Blu-ray in the same sentence?) and will be releasing quite soon. The televisions should begin to appear shortly across the company’s retail channels.