Toshiba Thrive Review
Toshiba Thrive (16GB)
Toshiba Thrive’s very aggressive pricing gives it an advantage over most other tablets. Its grooved back, full HDMI and USB support, full SD card slot, and replaceable battery justify its very bulky design. Also, its built-in file management system makes finding and accessing files in Honeycomb easier.
Toshiba Thrive isn’t a sexy tablet. It’s plump, a little bit awkward,although smart and supportive and you won’t be showing it off much to your buddies. If you reading this review, you probably already know that. You’re considering the Toshiba Thrive because you see past a pretty exterior and a tight slender body. You want great specs inside, a good clean install of Android 3.1 Honeycomb, ample full-sized ports, a swappable battery and other features.
Toshiba Thrive – Hardware
The Toshiba Thrive is quite the looker. The top of the box is all black, with a slick looking picture of the front of the tablet. It’s all very dark, mysterious, and thin looking. After all ,black is a thinning color.
Compared to Apple’s offering, and the current gold standard for thin and sexy, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Thrive looks a bit chunky, coming it at 272 x 175 x 16mm.
Thrive have Standard 10-inch resolution (1280 x 800), and while Toshiba didn’t rattle any cages by maintaining the status quo, they made a great decision in going with an IPS display. The colors have been really vivid in all my time spent browsing and toying around (the white wallpaper seen above illustrates the point).
Thrive has a 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and three options for onboard flash memory: 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB. This brings us to one of the Thrive’s strengths, which is the full-sized SD card slot that supports SD, SDHC, and SDXC, meaning storage is expandable by up to 128GB.
That is especially convenient if you already own several SD cards used for your digital cameras. Transferring photos on a vacation would mean simply plugging in your SD card to the Thrive eliminating the need for a card reader or to haul your laptop.
Connectivity and Battery
The Toshiba Thrive’s connectivity and battery is where it really shines. Like no other tablet, it throws in a full – sized HDMI out and a full – sized USB 2.0 port in addition to the common mini USB port. Full-sized USB port gives the Thrive an almost laptop like functionality allowing you to attach hard drives, flash drives, keyboards, and other accessories you normally wouldn’t be able to on a tablet.
Battery is listed as 23 W hr, but a quick look at the actual battery says 2030 mAh. It might not seem like much (and maybe it’s all part of Toshiba’s plan to have you buy more hot-swappable batteries), but it performs well. I’ve been getting a day of use out of it without problem, simulating moderate use. Checking email, web surfing, and Twitter aren’t really big battery wasters.
The Thrive’s software and Performance
Toshiba Thrive launches with Android 3.1 on it, with all of it’s goodies like Google Videos. The Toshiba’s also been pretty proactive about system updates, with a pre-release update and not one but two system updates while I’ve had the unit in my possession.
With the Vellamo Mobile Web Benchmark, which tests browser performance and stability in the areas of JavaScript, rendering, networking, and user experience using pixel manipulation, blending, page download, reload, cache performance, WebKit, SunSpider, and the V8 benchmarking kit from Google. For user interface and experience, it uses multiple scrolling tests and sample web pages. The Thrive scored a 968, putting it just ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 also running Android 3.1 Honeycomb. In particular, the Thrive performed better in the areas of networking and rendering.
The cameras
Tosgiba Thrive’s 5MP camera is pretty similar to everything you might expect from a camera on a mobile device. It shoots in 720p, takes some decently clear pictures in bright sunlight, doesn’t include a flash, and rapidly loses quality as you lose sources of light.