Toshiba Thrive 7-inch tablet now available (kinda)
The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus that I just reviewed just got some more competition courtesy of Toshiba. The company’s 7-inch Thrive tablet just popped up on some weird US online store for businesses, which means that it should be available from better known stores soon. The price is listed at $450 for the 32GB version, but that might not be the final price when it’s truly available to consumers.
The Thrive 7-inch is pretty much identical in size to most 7-inch tablets that aren’t the 7.0 Plus, with a thickness of 12 mm and a weight of 400 grams that matches the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet pretty perfectly. The 1280 x 800 display should provide plenty of eyecandy, even though running on Tegra 2 won’t win anyone any awards these days. Aside from WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS the thing has both a microSD slot and micro-HDMI, which means that you at least don’t need any proprietary adapter for connecting to an external screen, even if micro-HDMI isn’t exactly widespread yet either. Camera-wise you have a 5 megapixel back camera with an LED light and a 2 megapixel front camera. It runs on Android 3.2, which is pretty much a given these days as you can’t run any lower versions of Honeycomb on 7-inch devices.
Hopefully this one will pop up on more familiar retailers soon, both in the US and elsewhere. The 7-inch segment is taking off, and it’s great to see more “premium” models join the other side of the fence from the budget models.
[Engadget via Google+Reader” target=”_blank”>Pocketables]
