When we were at CES earlier this year in Las Vegas, Toshiba had a few tablets that caught our interest. One was the Honeycomb Tablet PC that is coming out this June and is already available for pre-order. It is dubbed the Toshiba Thrive, but was unnamed when we saw it at CES. There was another tablet the company was showing off with the Windows 7 OS, but it looks like Toshiba is abandoning their plans to release said slate PC.
Toshiba recently updated their roadmap for 2011 and left out the Windows 7 Slate PC that they showed off at CES. No word yet on why the company decided to do it, but the lack of success in other Windows Tablets could have something to do with it. There is no denying the allure of Android, and the fact that it is a free operating system is attractive to many companies. With Toshiba focusing more on Android devices it may not be until next year that they release a Windows tablet. They might have something in the works for Windows 8, which will have a tablet friendly version to make Microsoft relevant in the slate PC world.
The Toshiba Thrive is very attractive with its Android 3.0 operating system and features a 10.1 inch touchscreen with a resolution of 1280×800 and will feature a Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. It has a new LED display technology to give higher contrast and resolution than the traditional LCD based tablets we have seen. It will also employ Adaptive Display technology, which automatically adjusts contrast and brightness depending on surrounding ambient light.
One of the nice features of this device is that it will convert videos to HD quality, similar to how DVD players will convert the resolution to higher resolution. You will be able to view your HD content in 16:10 aspect ratio for superior performance. You can listen to the audio via the stereo speakers or headphones with the headphone jack.
Toshiba will be selling the tablets in two versions of the Thrive Tablet with the same specs but different memory. The 8GB version of the Thrive will run you $450 while the 32 GB model will be $579.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
