Just in time for the holiday season, Toshiba started selling its Excite 7 Android tablet for an affordable $170 price tag.

Toshiba refreshed its tablet lineup a few months ago, launching some exciting slates. Two models boasted high-end displays with 2,560 x 1,600 resolution and packed NVIDIA's new Tegra 4 chip under the hood. What Toshiba did not cover with its summer refresh, however, was the smaller-screen category.

The company is now returning to the small-screen, budget-friendly category with its new Excite 7, a new Android tablet with an attractive $170 price tag. As the name suggests, the slate comes with a 7-inch display.

This is not Toshiba's first attempt to compete on the small-screen tablet market. Its first 7-inch tablet, the Toshiba Thrive 7, turned out to be a disappointment due to its cheap build quality and poor battery performance. The company then went overboard with the Toshiba Excite 7.7, a high-end tablet with an AMOLED screen and Tegra 3 processor, but a $500 price tag. The smaller Toshiba Excite 7.7 cost the same as a 10-inch tablet, which limited its success.

Toshiba is now giving it another shot with its new Excite 7, a cheap and low-end offering. The tablet comes with a 7-inch display with a resolution of 1,024 x 600 pixels, a quad-core Rockchip processor clocked at 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage capacity, and a microSD card slot for additional memory. The slate also features a 3-megapixel rear camera and a 0.3-megapixel front-facing shooter.

The Toshiba Excite 7 sports a rugged, yet chunky design. The rear cover is made of plastic, but it seems quite resistant to scratches and fingerprints due to its pattern of small raised dots. In terms of dimensions, the tablet is 0.43-inch thick.

It sounds like a decent offering, but it will have some notable rivals to challenge. The Dell Venue 7 is thinner and has a better resolution, it comes with double the storage (16GB) and has a lower $150 price point. The ASUS MeMo Pad HD 7 also has a higher-resolution display, 16GB of internal storage capacity and costs $150. It remains to be seen whether Toshiba can make it with its new Excite 7.