When Toshiba entered the tablet competition and unveiled the Toshiba Thrive, the manufacturer boasted that its entry packs a full-sized USB and HDMI ports in its chassis. This type of port in a tablet is a very welcome feature indeed but these came at a price – the Toshiba Thrive was one of the bulkiest and heftiest tablets to be released in the market. Because of this, the tablet did not get the warm reception it was expecting from the tablet-buying population even if it had these ports aside from the fact that its back panel was user-replaceable as well.
Despite this, there are still those who think that the Toshiba Thrive is worth the attention and the dinero and still went on and got themselves one of these bulky babies. Initially released with Android 3.0 Honeycomb under the hood back in July of 2011, Toshiba confirmed that the Toshiba Thrive will also get a taste of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ICS update for the tablet was supposed to drop last Spring but has been delayed twice already. The last we heard from the manufacturer is that the tablet will get its taste of Ice Cream Sandwich this Fall.
Toshiba however missed it projected ICS Fall rollout for the Toshiba Thrive but it did so in a good way. As it stands, there are reports that the manufacturer has recently started the rollout of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update for the tablet. Although the update is being pushed via OTA, users of the Toshiba Thrive also have the option of accessing the tablet’s Service Station application to manually check for the update.
The update will reportedly take approximately 30 minutes to download and once applied to the Toshiba Thrive, it will bring the usual array of goodies and treats associated with Ice Cream Sandwich. In addition to that, Toshiba also bundled a slew of performance improvements to the update. These include improvements to the audio and video performance of the Toshiba Thrive. Also, the update will enhance its camera functions and improve the connectivity and signal strength of the tablet.
As for owners of the 7-inch version of the Toshiba Thrive, users of the 7-incher still have to wait some more for the ICS update to land on their tablets.
As for the original version of the Toshiba Thrive, the tablet relies on its NVIDIA Tegra 2 T20 chipset to supply power to its operation. It has a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with a 1 GHz clock speed which works with a full gigabyte of RAM to give the tablet a snappy performance. The Toshiba Thrive was released in storage options that range from 8GB to as much as 32GB while an SD slot in its chassis allows memory expansion on the tablet. Display-wise, the Toshiba Thrive comes with a 10.1-inch IPS LCD with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels while its dual shooter department includes a rear 5MP shooter and front 2MP snapper.
