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of the Toshiba Laptop Battery First post by: www.laptop-battery-stores.com
Software
Describing what Android 3.1 brings to the table is an article unto itself, so I won't dive into it here, but suffice it to say that Honeycomb is still a lovely, functional, stylish operating system that's steadily improving and unfortunately doesn't (yet) have the app support it needs. Gmail, Google Maps, Google Books and YouTube are all fairly fantastic, as is Honeycomb's Calendar and Gallery, the revamped Google Music is pretty neat, and should you visit the Android Market you'll find a handful of cool stuff. TweetComb is a handsome tablet Twitter solution, IMDB and Movies by Flixster both get you your local showtimes, trailers Toshiba PA3084U-1BRS Battery and info in a very pleasing fashion, Pulse has a fantastic UI for browsing news from the comfort of your couch, and both Google Earth and Google Body are definitely worth checking out. In addition to these, Toshiba bundles a variety of software with the Thrive:
?App Place is Toshiba's very own app store, which could theoretically help you find tablet-friendly apps, but is presently not worth your time -- it holds a grand total of 38 apps at the moment, and feels like a slimy pitchman at the time of this writing. Most apps charge a hefty monthly fee, though each includes a 14- or 30-day free trial. Oh, and when you sign up for an account, "Yes, contact me with offers and updates" is checked by default.
?Start Place is Toshiba's visual news reader, which provides Toshiba PA3729U-1BRS Battery Associated Press stories in a visually pleasing manner, but rather slowly -- it gave me Sunday's news on Wednesday, and Wednesday's news on Thursday morning.
?Book Place is an additional e-reader bookstore (powered by Blio) that's fairly ugly and slow. It does let you search for free e-books, but otherwise I'd never use it over the included Google Books. Toshiba's done the reader a disservice by leaving this on the front page and relegating Google's version to the app drawer.
?File Manager is actually quite useful, letting you quickly and Toshiba PA3399U-1BRS Battery easily browse and transfer files between attached USB drives, SD cards and the Thrive's internal storage. I wasn't pleased with the attached image viewer, though -- it lets you "pinch to zoom" on your photos, but you're actually only enlarging the pixels of a low-res thumbnail.
?Silver Creek's Backgammon, Solitare, Hearts, Spades and Euchre are included, in case traditional card games and board games are your thing.
?Toshiba also includes a variety of trial apps, including Kapersky Tablet Security, LogMeIn Ignition (a remote desktop service), PrinterShare, Mog Music and Need for Speed: Shift, the last of which amusingly (read: not at all amusingly) launches App Place in an attempt to have you immediately purchase it.
?There's also the Swype tablet keyboard, which actually isn't enabled by Toshiba PA3395U-1BRS Battery default -- you'll have to dig through the settings menu if you'd like to type with one-finger gestures.
Performance and battery Life
With the same basic Tegra 2 internals as all its compatriots in the Android tablet space, you'd expect the Thrive to perform similarly, and you'd mostly be right. I found Toshiba's device just as speedy as a Galaxy Tab 10.1 when using apps, playing games and navigating the Honeycomb UI. (With Android 3.1 on board, I felt it was actually a touch more responsive and better at playing back 720p Flash video content than devices without.) That said, the Thrive lags behind the competition in three important ways. First, it doesn't seem to be quite as stable as its comrades, as I noticed a variety of annoying app and browser crashes, and notably those Force Closes Toshiba PA3250U-1BRS Battery occurred even with just the stock selection of apps on board. Second, despite the Thrive's considerable girth, battery life is actually somewhat worse.
Toshiba promises up to 11 hours of use on the Thrive's removable 2030mAh battery, but I'm afraid I didn't get nearly that -- using our brand-new battery test, which which cycles through a series of websites and high resolution images with brightness set at 65 percent, the Thrive petered out at five hours and 28 minutes. That's actually not horrible, and the Thrive lasted the entirety of a day with far more sporadic use, but the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 managed over an hour of extra runtime in the very same test, despite its incredible slimness. Of course, if you've got $90 and the tenacity to use your Thrive as a battery charger, you can Toshiba PA3356U-1BRS Battery always purchase an additional removable battery pack, but the extra cost makes it an unlikely proposition.
Third and most importantly, the Thrive has a terrible bug as of today. Many users are reporting -- and we can confirm on our review units -- that the slate will randomly fail to wake up after going to sleep. This frequently meant that if I was in the middle of a browsing session or a game and put the Thrive down for a while, it wouldn't power back on, and I'd need to do a hard reset or pull the battery to use the Thrive once more. That doesn't seem to be the only issue with the Thrive's sleep mode, either, as Toshiba PA3291U-1BRS Battery I noticed that Google Music would often fail to cycle to the next song with the screen off. Now, Toshiba representatives are readily acknowledging the sleep issues, and promised us that they'll be fixed soon -- "We are aggressively working to implement a fix that resolves this issue and will push an update as soon as possible," wrote one -- but this is a quality assurance failure of serious proportions. We're very surprised that Toshiba would let the Thrive ship without more rigorous testing, particularly when it's throwing around terms like "finished innovation" to advertise the product.
Quite frankly, the resume-from-sleep issue is nasty enough that we couldn't possibly Toshiba PA3506U-1BRS Batteryrecommend the Thrive until Toshiba sorts that out, but even should the company fix it promptly, you might be better off spending your money elsewhere. Forgetting the full-size ports and considerable girth for a moment, the main thing that distinguishes the Thrive from competitors is how thoroughly average it is -- when every other major tablet manufacturer has put their best foot forward, the Thrive offers merely an average experience. That might be fine if Toshiba undercut the competition on price, but the entry-level Thrive (which comes with only 8GB of flash storage!) is still $429. Meanwhile, the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, which is superior in almost every way, costs only $400, and you can nab theToshiba PA3591U-1BRS Battery Acer Iconia Tab A500 for the same price, which comes with a USB port and a superior multimedia experience even as it suffers slightly in terms of battery life. If your desire for full-size HDMI ports and SD card slots is insatiable, we sympathize, as those are definitely features we want on our slates as well, but we'll wait for a more smartly designed tablet to integrate those ports before we lay our money on the table.
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