Toshiba’s had announcements around an Android tablet for quite some time, but it’s only now that there’s an actual product you can buy. Known as the Thrive internationally, it’ll just be the Tablet AT100 locally for truly strange trademark reasons. Like most recent competitors, this is an Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablet with a 10.1-inch display, but it does have a few unique features that make it stand out from the Android pack. Android 3.0 isn’t cutting-edge, but Toshiba reckons it’ll be updated to 3.1 in short order.
It’s a bit thicker than other Honeycomb tablets, but contoured in a way that makes it fairly easy to hold. The thick build of the Tablet allows Toshiba to give it full-size HDMI and USB ports. The HDMI port allows it to mirror content via a standard HDMI cable and the USB port lets it take content in from standard USB drives for playback. That’s a step above some competing solutions that either use micro cables or rely on docks or limited ports for access.
Toshiba also provides a playback utility for increasing the resolution of video for playback, although its codec support isn’t as wide as we would have liked. The internal recipe of the Tablet doesn’t differ that much from other Honeycomb units we’ve looked at recently, including the use of a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor, 16GB of onboard storage and 1GB of RAM.
Toshiba does differ from the pack in offering a removable battery, meaning you can buy spares at $79 a pop. That’s a new idea for tablets, but there’s a significant drawback. There’s no external battery charger, so to take advantage of a dual-battery strategy, you’d have to charge both of them in the device first and then swap them out as each one goes flat. The Tablet is Wi-Fi only, which partly explains the slightly lower asking price; Toshiba expects to have a 3G-enabled model available in the Australian marketplace somewhat later, although it’s not exactly saying when.
All up, the Tablet works as well as any Android Honeycomb tablet we’ve seen and being able to add full-size USB flash drives, SD cards and HDMI video out does give it some tricks that the others don’t offer. Still, no vendor has really personalised an Android tablet in the way that some Android phones have been, which makes for a rather bland experience. We’re still waiting for some really good Honeycomb-specific applications, too — at the moment it’s undeniably outpaced by the iPad’s app offerings and at this kind of price point, the iPad 2 is still the all-purpose tablet to buy.
