The Swiss Army Knife of Tablets: Toshiba's Thrive

You get 5 customizable home screens along with the traditional Honeycomb interface, its copy and paste functionality, multi-tasking support via the task manager pane and resizable widgets.  Toshiba also includes a custom-built file manager that does a nice job of organizing files from three primary sources on in the tablet: internal memory, SD card and external USB storage.  The media player app is pretty straight-forward but does offer a nice UI and also the ability to browse network sources for content as well.

The Thrive also comes with pre-installed Toshiba App and Book stores, as well as a news portal app.  The app store has some novel items and a fairly sleek UI but the tablet also comes with Google's stock Android market as well. The same thing goes for the books store app and Google's Book market is on board too.  These apps might provide some additional content sources but neither are going to compete all that well versus what Google and other major content players like Amazon and others provide in currently available apps.  EA's Need For Speed: Shift was a nice touch, though only a demo version.

Finally, we took a quick snap with the Thrive's on-board 5MP camera and it's safe to say performance was on par with what we've seen from other Android tablets in this price range.  The camera app you use is also what comes stock with Android 3.1, which is actually quite full-featured and handy.  As we've seen previously with other tablets, in low light situations, you need a steady hand for stills, and even then, images will still be a grainy. However, in outdoor lighting, image quality is fairly solid. The tablet's 720p HD video quality isn't going to rival even a Flip video camera either, but it's still nice to have for random, spur of the moment shots nonetheless.