And in that, at least, this 10-inch tablet does not disappoint. Has a full sized USB port and HDMI, an SD card slot, and a removable battery - all the features you would find on a laptop faster. It comes with a raft of practical applications already installed, so you do not have to go hunting for them on the Android Market. It's one of the first results of the gates with Android 3.1, enhanced version of Honeycomb denied. Oh, and it starts at $ 429, undercutting many of its competitors. There, in less than one paragraph, we have laid out why you might want it on one of the other tabs crowding the market. But should you get? Well, the people, we will need more than one paragraph to resolve it. Join us after the break, right?
Hardware
If Thrive is a person, it would cry on the couch with a pint of Ben & Jerry's right about now. Even before it went on sale earlier this month, he was fielding a mockery because of something fatso. Unfortunately, really, given that most of the bullies do not see it directly. That's not to say Thrive is skinny - at .62 inches thick, indeed, chunkier than other board on the market. Why, it's almost double the thickness of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 which measures 0.33 inches. And at 1.66 pounds, it's a touch heavier than the first generation iPad, which has since gone on a diet.
The problem is, it's no big deal. In fact, you might even feel lighter than you expect. Now it is true, after getting some hands-on time with the upcoming slate of Sony S2, we are reminded that Thrive is more severe than most. However, it does not feel solid as Motorola Xoom, though Xoom weighs a tenth of the whole pound less. All told, it's still light enough that we do not think twice about throwing in a bag and walk around with all day. And when it comes to web surfing on your couch with your feet propped up against it - a scenario that is possible with just a WiFi tablet - it's plump buttocks Thrive makes zero difference. If there is, we take issue with Thrive's dimensions. At 10.97 x 6.97 inches, the other is about as narrow as 10-inchers Galaxy Tab 10.1, but much longer. That does not make a difference in portrait mode, but it does make holding it in landscape is much more severe.
Even after a week of testing, we have difficulty coming to terms with a clear design Thrive awkward. The back is decorated in the colors of rubber that makes it look rather cheap (paperback port does not help). For credit, though, that the soft material makes it virtually impossible for your fingers to slip. Textured pattern Toshiba netbook lid reminds us, except a line across the back side on the corner diagonally symmetrical. It's also a removable lid, like a battery - something we will touch on more in a bit. Although Thrive comes in black, you can buy swappable, colorful cover in "Blue Moon," Raspberry Fusion "," Lavender Bliss, "Sky" Silvery, "and" Green Apple "for $ 20 a pop.
Unlike most tablets, which requires you to hold them in landscape mode to capture images, both cameras Thrive placed along one edge is shorter, so you can hold comfortably in portrait mode when you shoot. As you can see, the Toshiba is framed with a piece of metal that drapes on the edge of the tablet. On the outer side of the bar, you'll find a few that stand out "with Google" branding, along with a resolution of 5 megapixel camera behind it, somewhat. Thrive when we previewed last month, we saw more than a few commentators said metal is developing its own would be a deal-breaker. We disagree, although we think branding is especially unfortunate looking. It calls to mind something that will pick up at the hardware store - an, odd faux-growing industry to another tablet feels like a toy.
The laptop Thrive in a manner reminiscent of other, more profitable. It has three LED lights built into the panel so you can see the gleaming white-orange when the battery is low, when the Bluetooth is activated, and, at least, when the power is on. Even on our laptops, we like our hidden LED lights, and we feel more strongly about it with the tablet, where we had just come to expect a clean design.
Display and Sound
Crams 10.1-inch screen at 1280 x 800 pixels, which matches the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the board is identical to the other sizes. Although it's a lot of bright, not very wide viewing angle. We have an easy time watching movies with the tablet is placed face-up on the table in front of us, and we also can see the screen when viewing from off-center position. But as we move further to the side and tried to look at more oblique angles, contrast ratio began to look even worse. As a bonus, Toshiba threw in the same Resolution + technology used to clean and upscale video in the laptop, but you will find it hard to see the difference on such a small screen. If you prefer, you can disable this feature, although we do not feel the need.
Small stereo speakers are loud, but never too hard. While watching the movie alone in a room with air conditioning noisy spinning in the background, we continue to turn the volume to the max, and do not really feel the need to reject it. At some point during our testing, a friend to join us as we run the benchmark Nenamark 1 and 2 in the background. In the end, the sound emanating from the test is quite hard to interrupt, but not so deafening that we can not do on their conversation.
In addition to volume, Toshiba also includes software that is designed to enrich the quality of audio - a feature that does not come enabled out of the box. Back when we saw the preview Thrive, we said that even with these improvements, we can still detect some tinniness coming out of small speakers. After a week of testing, we stand it - the sound quality does not stick out as a terrible, just not exceptional.
Removable battery
We must have looked pretty silly the first time we tried to remove the back cover. The problem is, it's much easier to pry the cap off the phone, when you can cradle, and the pressure on the back cover with your thumb for leverage. Try doing that with a 10-inch tablet and see how far you get. After much fumbling, we know the best way to go about this is to first open the door that covers all full-sized port. Then wedge your fingernail into the gap below the compartment, and pull the cover toward you until it falls away with the snap discomfiting. (Dig your fingers into the hole near the speakers also work.) Once we got past the learning curve, it is easy to take off the lid. Hopefully, we just avoid some of you a little frustrated.
Battery and power management
And depending on your lifestyle, you might want to think about getting one. Compared with other products, Thrive is a small battery craps out pretty quickly. It lasted six hours and twenty-five minutes in our tests (the movie looping, WiFi, and Bluetooth turned off), trailing far behind the iPad 2 was nearly ten and a half hour walk and the 10.1 's about ten hours of spinning. Even the battery life tablet we would call mediocre most of the successful landing somewhere in the range of seven to eight hours.
That said, with a lighter usage patterns we found we could get away with not filling it every night. After an hour of checking email, watching YouTube HD trailer, tweaking the settings of this tablet, intermittently glancing at Engadget and Google Calendar, and download the three applications, we still have a 87 percent charge remaining. We did notice that the web surfing (including some Flash sites), drain the battery faster than any of those other activities previously mentioned. After just ten minutes of browsing, the battery life rating fell five percent. On the bright side, Thrive sips a little power when it sits idle: after two hours and forty minutes, the battery life rating fell just two percent.
At this writing, Toshiba has been at least acknowledge this problem and says it will push out the fix through the application of Toshiba Workshop which comes pre-loaded on the tablet. Unfortunately, though, it's unclear when we can expect Toshiba to pull through. Suffice it to say, we see this not as an excuse to ignore Thrive, but more of a reason to put off buying one now.
Performance
Like so many other tablets on the market, Thrive runs on NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC. A cold boot takes about 20 seconds, which is compatible with Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the same 1GHz chip package. Once we swiped through the lock screen, tablet less than two seconds to open the Honeycomb.
For the most part, Thrive responded snappily to the tap and friction, as well as multi-touch gestures such as pinching and zooming. Sometimes, though, we see a slight pause when you press the home key to minimizing the application of a sudden. All told, we saw the greatest performance drops while the website was built in Flash - an area where we have seen others stumble Honeycomb tablet. The New York restaurant Lattanzi, for example, show only four items on his menu at once, forcing you to press the "Next" to see more. Also met struggling with it, leaving us empty stab at the screen before we finally took the tap. In another example, we peruse Uniqlo.com, and found that when we stop items from clothing to get more details, rolled suddenly become choppy. Thrive at least Flash sites loaded quickly, even if its performance suffers once we start churning. In any case, we are more likely to say that Google - not Toshiba - still could stand to improve the experience of Flash.
On the bright side, the stock Android keyboard typing on a consistent airy feel, with some spelling errors reported after a week of testing. Indeed, the speed is only limited by your ability to peck out the letters. Incidentally, quite a narrow tablet that is easy to type in portrait mode, even if you have small hands (like most of us). Incidentally, the tablet also comes with Swype installed, if you think dragging a line between the letters would be more ergonomic experience than typing with two fingers. Personally, we still doubt - after all, not a beauty Swype you can hold the device with one hand and use the same fingers to type? However, it is nice that people have the option to use it.
If you are looking for some hard numbers, we ran Linpack benchmark Android compatible, Quadrant, and Nenamark 1 and 2. As you can see, Quadrant score above 1584 in accordance with the 1546 Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 grooved after the update to Android 3.1. But Quadrant, of course, is just one part of the puzzle of comparison, although we think it means that the two tablets share the same chip and also happens to fit in the real world tests, such as winter boots. If you're a benchmark junkie, though, you'll find some other value in a handy chart below.
Benchmark Score
Quadrant 1584
2.79 Linpack MFLOPS (single thread) / 2.93 MFLOPS (multi-thread)
Nenamark a 43.8 fps
Nenamark 2 18.3 fps
Vellamo 968
Neocore not run
Camera
In the grand tradition of the tablet cameras, Thrive is a 5 megapixel rear-facing a struggle in low light and in situations where the subject is moving. The other tablet Thrive do worse, though, by casting a bluish tint over the image. We also found a bit rough in a lot of photos, even if we take them with adequate lighting, and even when we see them shrink in the shape, size.
To boot, this is not a smooth picture-taking experience you will get on the tablet. Remember how we said that Toshiba stuck a camera on one end is shorter, so they'll be on top if you shoot in portrait mode? That's all well and good if you want to frame the picture vertically, but if you start snapping pics in landscape, you may find that you intentionally blur the lens mitts. Not exactly the problem we have with other board camera sitting on one of the two long sides.
In the case of unwanted tints, we have better luck with the 2 megapixel front-facing camera, although as you might imagine, the sharpness and level of detail is not good enough to actually, you know, photography. But for video chatting bright picture quality should be doing well.
The Thrive also record 720p video, though, every film you make will be just as vulnerable to a cloudy, faint blue. You will also notice that the motion in the video is not very smooth. Clips we shot with HTC Flyer much fluid, although to be fair, the camera is presented entirely different from the problem (read: roaring background noise).
File storage and transfer
Far be it for us to tell you how you should use a full sized USB port and SD slot attached to them, but suffice to say it would be useful for moving files on and off the tablet. Fortunately, Toshiba makes it almost too easy by bundling its own file manager app called - wait - File Manager Toshiba. Believe us when we say it's one of our favorite features of Thrive, and one of the most obvious reasons you should consider this in addition to the scads of other Android tablet on the market. Using a tabbed interface app, decide whether you want to see this tablet 8GB to 32GB of internal memory, SD card, or USB hard drive. Once you do, you'll see all the files displayed in the box, as you would if you were trying to find something in Windows Explorer or Finder in OS X.
Selecting files to copy, cut, paste, or delete also idiot-proof. If you only want to work with one file, you can press and hold with your finger to see a list of options. Or, if you want to handle their batch, press the "Select File" button at the bottom of the screen, at which point each file will be overlaid with an empty box that you can "check off" by touching it with your finger. If you go that route, such as cut and paste option will not appear on the screen, but will appear as a box in the lower panel. We simply walk you through it but really, is quite intuitive app that anyone can find out in about five seconds.
As for speed, this is hardly the fastest drive you will find, but it should not make you wait too long either. Photo batch transfer of 951MB in size about ten seconds. That is not exactly lightning-fast, but considering how rarely we take the time to remove the clot picture of our handsets, we do not expect we'll do it frequently with good tablet. Even if you do it more often, you might agree that it is quite fast for $ 429 toy.
Software
Right off the bat, there are two reasons to get excited about this software. One, Toshiba does not muck around with the UI standards of Honeycomb, so if you're the type who always choose vanilla Android over, say, Sense, which will be a slate Thrive in your heart.
Secondly, this is not just a Honeycomb tablet, but one of the first to ship with Android 3.1, the latest version of the tablet-friendly Android widgets that carry goods such as resizeable, new host mode, and new applications Google Movies. If you have not dealt tablet running the OS, you will discover that the resizeable windows is a joy, and make the stock Gmail and calendar applications, among others, are much more useful, even in an instant. The problem is, it's up to application developers to bring them up to speed, so that at an early stage you will find many that do not change size. However, it can even increase the standard artificial Google is very helpful.
Apps
Oh, and we have not even scratched the surface on a third-party applications. First, you can download 'em from "unknown sources" (read: other places of the Android Market). And, Toshiba pre-installed a large number of popular - some of which are too useful to be dismissed as bloatware. This includes some who normally have to pay, including LogMeIn Ignition ($ 29.99), QuickOffice ($ 24.99), and Kaspersky Security Tablet ($ 19.95 per year). Clothing also throw in some free favorites like Angry Birds, and The New York Times. Missing, however, is any Facebook and Twitter clients. Some, meanwhile, it smells like crapware. This includes most of the raft of games, which include NFS Shift, Backgammon, Euchre, Hearts, Spades, and Solitaire. Then there's Toshiba Place to Start bland headlines. We are happy to not open it again, and just stick with the standalone application from The New York Times and other favorites.
The Company also casts its own e-reader application, dubbed Place Books. This is actually the second reader application that comes bundled on Thrive, with Google being the second book. We get what Toshiba is after - providing low-tech people like our parents enough applications so they do not need to download anything or (heaven forbid) ask for help. But we suspect most of you are very tiny bit more independent than that, and we think you will enjoy a better option if you only download the Amazon or Barnes & Noble apps, because they are backed by a large library with a lot of current, popular titles ..
Perhaps our favorite applications - second only, perhaps, to the File Manager - is printershare, an application that allows you to find the nearest printer and print documents, photos, and web pages via WiFi. We fell in love as easily be used as a utility. Just open the application, select the application from which you may want to print something, and then find a list of documents printed (or, in the case of Gmail applications, messaging). We want each tab to come up with something like this out of the box.
Besides all this, Toshiba threw his own app store, although it is quite useful. Although the comprehensive category, we calculate a maximum of six applications per section (often only one), and we see a particular title appears in some parts - say, Office and Productivity.
Configuration and competition
Do not be scared off by the price of $ 579 is listed at the top of this review. That's just for the 32GB version, the highest end that Toshiba has to offer. The Thrive actually starts at $ 429 for 8GB and 16GB are also offered in flavors for $ 479. For now, it's plain-Jane WiFi-only tablet, but Toshiba has said it plans to release a 3G version later this year.
However you slice it, it's some aggressive pricing. Both 16GB and 32GB versions weaken the iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab 10.1 to $ 20. We use this as a comparison because they are both current favorite tab. The 10.1, in particular, have exactly the same size screen, same packaging Tegra 2 chip, and also one of the first tablet to ship with Android 3.1. Both are sleek and sexy - just not something that Thrive. To weigh against the Thrive is to evaluate your priorities: how much you are willing to pay for beauty? And if you had to choose, would you rather go to a full-sized ports or featherweight design?
But let's not count with the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. In a market full of sheet lookalike, Transformer and Thrive both tried their darndest to be different. In the case of Thrive, a full-size port hook. For the Transformer, the docking station filled with a full keyboard. This is an interesting comparison, because if you buy Thrive, you may be interested in plugging in a USB keyboard.
We must say, we would be very tempted to have a more integrated keyboard solutions, especially when we're traveling. The problem is, the convenience does not come cheap. At first glance, Transformer cheaper, because the 16GB and 32GB models cost only $ 399 and $ 499, respectively. But, if you want to, you know, change it, you should spring for the $ 150 dock, rendering moot any delusions effective prices. The point is, the idea of entering into the keyboard Thrive still should appeal to those who would rather not invest that much money in the Transformer. Not to mention - the Thrive USB port for things other than the keyboard, such as connecting an external hard drive.
For purposes of this review, we will not go on long tangents about our favorite 7-inch tablet, although some, such as Flyer, count among the good we've tested. We are looking for, if you have decided 7-inch offering the perfect compromise between portability and big screen goodness, Thrive just is not right for you.
Wrap-up
Inevitably, every time a new tablet out, we find ourselves asking, "Why did you pick over everything else?" And frankly, in a market with so many choices forgotten it's not always an easy question to answer. Thrive in the case, at least, you've potentially got enough built-in excuse to rely on both hands. This should be a full-sized USB and HDMI ports, not to mention the SDXC slot allows you to use one of your memory card has no doubt accumulated over the years. It comes with many useful applications - some of which cost money - which means if you'll be up and running quickly (and so will the low-tech person you give this as a gift). It runs Android 3.1 on tab while most do not. Oh, and it's price to sell. Starts at $ 429 for 8GB, so prominent in the market that really do not need another $ 500 or $ 600 a slate. We say, get the 8GB version, pair it with an old SD card, and have yourself a party.
That does not mean it's for everyone. Some of you when deciding this stuff out that was too fat, too ugly. We're sure some of you (no, not you) passed this review and jump directly to the comment to reiterate how this oogly. And if it's a deal-breaker, we would not blame you - it's true, Thrive do a better job to make the weight than the other tabs (we see you, Touchpad). But why settle for chunky tablet if you do not give toot about the USB port and SD card slot? This is a fair point, and we agree that anyone who buys this needs to be enamored with either price or selection of ports. And even then, this is the best for people who want a USB socket for storage, in particular, after all, the Eee is very good and popular Pad Transformer makes moot USB keyboard - assuming you get down to spend $ 150 on the docking station, of course. All told, there are many tablets are thinner, sexier, durable (and yes, more expensive) to be had, with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and iPad 2 comes to mind first. However, we suspect there are some people out there who've been waiting for something like this.
General:
Released:10/07/2011
Form Factor:?
Hardware Keyboard:?
Size
Width:10.75 inches
Height:6.97 inches
Depth:0.62 inches
Weight:25.57 ounces
Display
Type:Capacitive
Technology:?
Size:10.1 inches
Resolution:1280x800px
Camera
Megapixels:5 MP
Autofocus:Yes
Flash:No
Megapixels:5 MP
Video Quality:720p
Secondary Camera
(Front Facing)
Megapixels:2 MP
Autofocus:?
Flash:?
Video Quality:?
Connectivity
Bluetooth:Yes
USB:MiniUSB
Wifi:802.11b/g/n
GPS:Yes
Multimedia
Headset Jack:3.5mm
Speakerphone:?
FM Tuner:No
Browser:?
Battery
Type:Li-Ion
Capacity:2030 mAh
Removable:Yes
OS
Version:Android 3.1
Custom UI:None
Hardware
Internal Memory:8,16,32 GB
External Memory:Standard SD
External Memory Amount:Up to 32 GB
RAM:1 GB
Processor:NVIDIA
Processor Speed:1 GHz
