Review of Toshiba Thrive Tablet

We’ve seen a flood of Android tablets this year, most of them largely the same.

They run the same operating system, and they’re pretty close when it comes to size, weight, processing power and price. So when all the big stuff is baked, it’s the little things that make a tablet stand out.

Toshiba’s Thrive tablet, a 10.1-inch slate that starts at $430 for the 8GB, Wi-Fi only model, is a stand-out, alright — it’s the biggest and heaviest of the tablets from the major manufacturers.

At 1.66 pounds, it’s much heftier than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (1.24 pounds) and the T-Mobile G-Slate (1.38 pounds) and just a hair heavier than the HP TouchPad and the Motorola Xoom. The Thrive is also 0.63 inches thick, where almost everyone else comes in at well under half an inch.

Being the fattest kid in class sounds like a silly way to differentiate. But the extra bulk allows for some attractive features absent in other tablets.

First, the battery is user-replaceable. You can pry off the plastic back using only your fingernails and swap out the battery, which looks like a flat, 5-inch square. Toshiba sells spare batteries for $80 each. The Thrive is efficient, lasting about eight hours between charges in my tests, so you’ll really only need to swap batteries after a few years of use, or if you’re away from a power socket for an entire weekend.

And if you don’t like the black plastic rear shell — or if you crack it while taking it on and off, which seems highly unlikely given its flexibility — that’s replaceable, too. Toshiba sells a variety of colored plastic backs for $20 each.

Finally, the Thrive boasts an array of ports closer to what you’d see on a laptop than a tablet. Behind a rubber panel on the bottom edge are an HDMI port, a full-size USB port and a mini USB port. Just around the corner from those sits an SD card slot.

Using these ports, you can attach all sorts of external storage to augment the tablet’s on-board memory. The Thrive ships with up to 32GB on-board, but the cheapest model only has 8GB. With such scant storage, all the expansion options are a huge plus.

I loaded some movies and MP3s onto a USB stick and an external Seagate drive, and the Thrive could play back the media stored on either. I also fed it some SD cards, which it handled with equal success.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

GOOGLE introduced revised code-named Android Ice Cream. This latest version will be available in June or July. Features Ice Cream has not been clearly established. But there is a possibility is the conversion of interface elements of the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) to smartphones. Reportedly a media player interface is optimized for mobile phones but the menu button is not on screen, but in the body of the phone itself, such as Android 3.0. Based on information from Google, the first phone that will adapt Ice Cream is Nexus Nexus S and mobile phones.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 2

http://www.android-ops.blogspot.com/Prediction Spec:

• 3D screen
• Processor NVidia Tegra 2
• 8.0-megapixel rear camera with 1080p video recording capabilities plus flash LED.While front-resolution 3.0-megapixel camera
• 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n, Bluetooth v3.0
• USB Port
• 64 GB internal memory
• MicroSD slot (up to 32 GB)
• 1024 MB RAM
• Accelerometer, gyroscope, Compass, Barometer

5 Top Android Games Must You Have

Sitting through traffic jams as a passenger or looking out the window on a really long commute can get boring after a while. You might want to take a break from reading and pass the time doing something a bit more stimulating. These must have Android games will truly impress you. Best of all, you can find a majority of these games online for free to download. Here are the top 5 must have android games for this year:

• UNIWAR – Uniwar is a great strategy game which will get your mind thinking. You can play online with as many as 8 players or head off into the gaming world in single player mode. You must capture the opponent bases in which the player will gain credits which can later be turned in for awesome units like helicopters and tanks. If you enjoy games of strategy, this is a must have Android game.

Android or Windows Phone

Android, WP7, as if life didn’t have enough choices, now there’s two more for you to mull over. The cell phone war has definitely gotten hot, which is great for consumers, because now, you can consider more than just the iPhone in your search for a cell. But the choice won’t be easy; choosing between Android and Windows phones is definitely going to take some time and investigating.

Let’s see here, where should we start? If you’re an avid Apps user, you will definitely be thinking about the, App hungry Android right? And that’s where you’d be wrong; I guess if you need to do something, you can say “Windows has an App for that too.” The two carriers are now going head to head with Apps for your use, or for driving you crazy when making your choice. If you use social networking windows phones has an App that lets you post to multiple social site at once. With the Addition of MotoBlur, the Android can feed all your social networking updates directly to your phone in the one App. Even without the MotoBlur, Android is still a machine built for Multitasking.