Review Toshiba THRIVE

This week I got a chance to play with the Toshiba Thrive. And the first thing I noticed about this Android Tablet is its rather robust in its design and a tad hefty. Also, with its 10.1” wide-screen touchscreen, with a resolution of 1280 x 800, it’s easy to see how Toshiba had movie watching in mind. But the sad fact is, that’s pretty much all I’d really use the Thrive for, that and maybe some Facebook or Twitter. And even then, there’s an utter lack of frustration in the experience that really isn’t Toshiba’s fault … it’s Android’s.

Dimension wise, the 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. That makes it great for video gaming and watching a movie on it’s 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 screen. But sadly, the speakers that come with the Thrive are woefully terrible – very tiny and distorted – almost like a cheap AM radio. And the volume buttons are backwards?! Very strange. So if you’re going to do anything that requires listening to audio, the best bet is to use a pair of headphones.

Now some like Android, and that’s fine. But I really don’t care for it. It’s the “PC” to the iOS’s Mac. Clunky and not ready for prime time. 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, but I had several crashes with other apps. But that may be the fault of the apps themselves. Downloading, even on a broadband WiFi connection took longer than I would have liked. In fact, when watching trailers at Quicktime Trailers, I often had to wake the tablet up. And there were several trailers I just plain gave up on. Watching YouTube, I sometimes had stutter. On the iPad, by contrast, they would pop right up and start playing with great audio and no jitter. The Thrive handles Flash pretty well, don’t get me wrong, but cheap mono audio and streaming live video left me with a lackluster, “artifacty” experience.