Toshiba Thrive is its rather simply amazing product!!
Toshiba Thrive is a bit thick at .62 inches, and could stand to go on a diet with a weight of 1.6 lbs. The tablet is 10.75” x 6.97” x 0.6, and has a ribbed, rubberized, non slip backing which makes the user feel like it’ll stay in hand without worry. The Thrive has a wide screen a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 chip and 1GB of RAM – pretty mainstream in the Android Tablet market. It comes with 10.1” wide-screen touchscreen, with a resolution of 1280 x 800, it’s easy to see how Toshiba had movie watching in mind.
Other features include a full-size HDMI for connecting to your HDTV, but you can also take advantage of the latest fun feature in the mobile world – mirroring, where the video image can be wirelessly streamed to a compatible HDTV. The Thrive also comes with either 8 GB, 16 GB, or 32 GB and it has the usual SD card slots for increasing your on board storage. There’s also the usual USB plug. Navigation buttons are all virtual through the Android 3.1 Honeycomb OS, giving the screen a tad more real estate.
The Thrive also uses dual cameras – one a typically cheap 2mp for video chat and then a 5 MP rear facing camera.The Thrive comes with a removable 2030 mAh battery which claims a battery life of 11 hours.
Boot time to the screen is about average – as it has to run through a tedious flash animation while it loads the Android OS. Then you have move the lock to get to the main screen. There, you get the basic Android experience.Now some like Android, and that’s fine. You have to go into settings and then manage applications just to force close or uninstall an App and that’s just plain tedious. Booting into apps like Facebook, Twitter and the Browser is fairly fast though.
The screen is crisp if you’re watching video indoors and away from a strong light source. Otherwise the glare from the screen can be off putting unless you angle it slightly. But even at extreme angles you can watch the screen, making sharing a video doable.But where the Thrive really shines is in game play. We played the demo of Need for Speed and the game was extremely responsive and fun to play (too bad I stink at driving games). Playing Angry Birds was a ton of fun with decent graphics.Skype worked via WiFi, and that’s where you’re reliant because the Thrive has no 3G connection, so you have to Skype where you’re WiFi connection is.
If you’re an Android geek, this may be a tablet for you.
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