Social Feed

steve4810 said:

Buddy, count me out of the folks who agree with that idea.

Rusty scissors can be used to carve a Christmas turkey if you recognize their limitations.

What they are are cheap attempts to double dip from the billfold of early adopters. I've been their before and now I find I am again.

Click to expand...

Well we will just have to disagree.

I use mine every day. I do agree the browser sucks, but it is fine for what little surfing I do currently. My Thrive works fine for what I do with insurance claims, accessing my Google docs, dropbox, email, hulu+, streaming my own music or video from my server or wdtv live hub, reading books, etc... The app selection isn't great but android has most of what I use. My bank app is really all I am missing, but it is on my iPhone and access is limited to that device, so I would have to use the browser anyway or take it off my iPhone.

They are not full laptop replacements, but you can do a lot with them. If I want to go thru reports while sitting on my porch in the morning, which I do a lot. Its much easier with the thrive than taking a 17 in laptop out there. If I want to create a presentation or rip a DVD, I'm obviously not going to do that on a tablet. It just comes down to what an individual is looking to use a tablet for. They have many uses for some people, obviously they're not for you yet.

Sent from my Toshiba Thrive

osu1991 said:

Just make sure you're getting the new Excite 10 series and not the Excite 10 LE. The LE is a dual core that was just a stop gap effort Toshiba put out that was slimmer than the Thrive when people complained about the Thrive's thickness.

The main differences between the Excite 10 and Thrive being the Excite 10 is slimmer, comes with ICS, has a quad core Tegra 3 processor instead of dual core, micro hdmi instead of full size hdmi, no full size USB.

The Thrives have been getting cleared out as refurbs on Woot and ebay. If you look around you will find them for $299 down to $229. I bought 2 refurb 32gb Thrives for $259 off ebay and they looked brand new.

I like them and wouldn't have any problem going with an Excite, other than I am in a unique situation in that I have to have a full USB port in order to use a tablet for work. I think Toshiba priced the Excites too high though. A $100 cheaper would be in line with the Samsung tablets, which in my opinion is their competition, not Apple.

Click to expand...

Thanks very much. I will carefully check specifications.

Sent from my iPhone using the SatelliteGuys App

osu1991 said:

Well we will just have to disagree.

I use mine every day

Click to expand...

Well I don't and it hacks me off more than a little bit.

Of course what you say is true. They do a lot more than my first desktop machine. My wife takes it to the office to show off her latest nature snaps. And Dish Anywhere works pretty well. And I can manage my investments in real time during market hours

But the actual justifications for purchasing so expensive a device are only half meant.

The battery life is as advertised and a fantastic improvement of my 3 yr old Dell with extra capacity battery. No complaints here.

Wifi and blu tooth(including HiFi stereo) work OK though I haven't tried any speed tests. Again no complaints

The screen and image quality are fine (they were great until The New Ipad)

The touch screen works OK but typing anything beyond "text message" length messages is a trial. (You have my admiration for the length of your preceding post. Do you use a accessory keyboard?). Maybe this is the best a 10" touch device can do but a couple of brief experiences with an Ipad make me doubt this.

A lot of my stock market requirements are meant but the one most important and very severely missed is a specific trading screen from TD Ameritrade called Command Center 2.0. It's a java runtime app which is ironic. TD's own online support people admitted to me no Android browser available today can load it. And I suspect that is because it requires more video processor power than the Android tablets presently available have to operate it. Probably because it provides realtime data flows from the exchanges. Which goes to my complaint that some table will be introduced not far in the future that will have improved performance enough so that folks like me will feel the need to donate their Thrives to charity (or very young family members) and buy a second tablet inside of 3 or 4 years. The industry's second dip into my pocket.

It cannot handle native HD video from my Cannon camcorder and there isn't a conversion app because, as it was explained to me, it would run so slow, if at all, that no one would tolerate it. As a class Android devices are severely processor limited, no doubt a trade off for battery run time.

There are no good mp3 players. What the Android Market calls "good" are those that display album art and let you wipe your way through them and offer shuffle play, neither of which I would ever use. What I call good is Media Monkey for Windows that can level adjust files on the fly or permanently and trim or just skip silent file beginnings and endings, variably cross fade from one song to the next, allow media files to be listed and sorted on any key (and have more than 2 or 3 keys!!), include adequate file management capabilities for library collection and have a configurable sync feature.

And hopefully only temporarily, The Android OS (3.2) has several serious faults: No way to change file permissions, no native networking, no decent file managers. A lot of applications like Dish Remote Access that have non alterable perspectives. All the menus in the Dish app are portrait only and the video landscape is only.

A business app I bought to keep xls spreadsheets up to date (and I believe the only one in existence) could not access the external SD card. After my complaint, and most likely others, they upgraded their app and solved that though it still cannot access network files. Again because of basic shortcomings of its file system.

I'll most likely live but I don't smile as much as I hoped when I bought it.

No accessories. I've played basketball all my life and have big hands, so typing on the Thrive is easier for me than typing on my iPhone.

Sent from my Toshiba Thrive

Well how about that. Ice Cream Sandwich for me tonight. All of America must be trying to update. 20 minutes on my 15mb service and I'm only 25% thru a 300mb download.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys