Toshiba's Excite isn't exactly brand new — it was unveiled at IFA and then released in Japan as the Regza AT7000 — but it is finally coming to America. The very thin, .3-inch thick / 1.2-pound tablet will be coming to the US sometime in the middle of the first quarter of the year, Toshiba says. And while it will launch with Honeycomb 3.2, it will be upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich very soon after. The tablet has much of the same specs as the one announced overseas, including a 10.1-inch 1280x800 display, 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel rear cam, and an 1.3-megapixel front-facing shooter.

I got a look at the Excite X10 a couple of weeks ago, and came away with many of the same thoughts as Paul had when he saw it at IFA in September. It's extremely thin and light, the aluminum back and rounded edges give it a nice feel, but the power button and the volume rocker aren't very finger friendly. The display is much better than the one on Toshiba's original Thrive, though it isn't as bright or crisp as the one on the iPad 2 or the Eee Pad Transformer Prime. As for software, Toshiba was only demoing the Honeycomb version, but it is leaving it rather untouched, save for the media and file manager it has installed. It plans to keep that clean feel when it brings ICS to it.

The 16GB version of the Excite will hit for $529.99. Stay tuned for more details, but in the meantime check out the video below.