Toshiba Thrive

It should probably come as no surprise that Toshiba have chosen to enter the tablet market, it is the next hot thing after all. They have chosen an interesting way to do it however. While most other tablet makers are trying to design sleek tablets that are as small as possible Toshiba have decided to go a completely different way with the Thrive.

The first thing that you will notice about the Toshiba Thrive is how big it is. This is especially true when it comes to thickness. The Thrive is the thickest tablet that we have seen on the market, this may not be a bad thing however. The main reason for that thickness is that it comes with a removable battery which is something that you don't see on other tablets. There are also several ports on the Thrive which greatly increases the uses that you will get over that of other tablets. Despite being quite large the grooved back does make it fairly easy to hold the Thrive in one hand.

The screen on the Thrive is a ten inch honeycomb which does provide for very good quality. There are two cameras which is standard on most tablets and they do provide for a good quality picture but the placement of them is a little bit awkward. In particular we found that we naturally placed our hands over the area where the camera is located when we held the Thrive. There is a feature on the Thrive that is supposed to improve the quality of the picture when you are watching standard definition videos. While it works the improvement was minimal. There is a similar feature for audio quality and it works quite well however.

The Toshiba Thrive uses the Android operating system that most people are quite familiar with. There are of course a whole series of apps that can be downloaded for the Thrive but there are also a few custom ones which are included. These would include Toshiba's ereader to allow you to read ebooks. There is also a news aggregator which works quite well. The media player will aggregate all of the media so that you can access it all from one interface. The most useful feature of the Thrive however is the file manager which makes it very easy to manage all of your files.

Overall the Toshiba Thrive is a good tablet and it is priced to be at the low end of the market so you really do get good value for your money. This is clearly a tablet that is intended to more closely replicate a laptop than other tabs on the market. The result is some good features but also a tablet that is a little bit bulky when compared to the others on the market. If you are not too concerned with the size of the tablet this may be a good option to consider.