The Swiss Army Knife of Tablets: Toshiba's Thrive

by Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, July 27, 2011, 11:50 AM EDT

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Battery Life Test

In an attempt to quantitatively measure the Thrive's battery life in a controlled benchmark environment, we ran a test in which we set up a webpage with a mix of graphics, Flash media and text. The page automatically refreshes every three minutes, we loop the page and also setup a screen lock utility that keeps the display from sleeping during the test. Battery life is then measured down to the minute the tablet finally shuts down. The WiFi radio is enabled in this test, to simulate battery life in real-world web browsing over an 802.11n wireless connection.

Battery Life Tests

Untethered Up-Time Measurements

For this test, we set the Thrive's display to 50% brightness, which is still plenty bright and easy on the eyes. The Thrive was able to last just over 5.6 hours untethered before it powered down.

This is a fairly new test in our set of benchmarks, so we don't have a lot of other tablet data yet to which we can compare. However, we have run the test on a few smartphones, the Motorola Xoom, Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Asus Transformer and Acer Iconia Tab. As you can see, as far as 10.1 slates go, battery life with the Toshiba Thrive brings up the rear with the Motorola Xoom, though Toshiba's tablet lasted about 20 minutes longer.

We would argue that a little over five and a half hours is acceptable performance for most folks, but the slightly smaller 23Whr battery in the Thrive, doesn't hold as much charge as the 24Whr and 25.87Whr batteries in the Asus Transformer and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, respectively. Then again, if you're really hard-pressed for extended battery life, the Thrive is the only tablet in our test with which you could actually swap out a spare back-up battery in a pinch.