After being delayed in the UK market for some time, Toshiba has finally confirmed yesterday that the tablet is named ‘The Thrive’ and will be available for pre-ordering from the next week.
The Thrive is being made available at an interesting price point of $429 for 8GB, $479 for 16GB, $579 for 32GB. It has got the latest build of Honeycomb i.e. Android v3.1 out of the box, an IPS display, full sized HDMI and USB ports, a swappable battery along with changeable back covers, which makes it stand out from the competition in the market. The back covers can be changed to any colour of your choice for $19.99.
Toshiba has not made any custom changes to its UI but have included Resolution+ brightening technology and an “enhanced” file manager (we would wait to see it live before commenting on that). Toshiba has also indicated that they might add some third-party apps, including QuickOffice and LogMeIn to the package.
Another interesting thing added by Toshiba is that they would be coming up with another version of the tablet with a different screen size, maybe a seven incher or so. But will this one be something utilizing the high resolution screen they demoed recently? Only time will tell. To be honest the Motorola Xoom running the same software disappointed us, we wait to see if the Honeycomb magic works for Toshiba.
