Difference Between Toshiba Thrive 7″ and Amazon Kindle Fire

The evolution of Tablet PCs is a matter of adapting to the needs and wants of the customer. Some manufacturers have found out that consumers rather prefer a 7-inch tablet than a 10 inch tablet, which almost resembles a Laptop in some cases. It was a leap of faith at first, but looking at the market today, Samsung’s initiation of 7 inch tablets has gained quite a lot of followers and top of the class products. The newest player in the 7 inch arena is Toshiba Thrive 7 inch which is a debut from Toshiba. As much popular for laptops as Toshiba is, the reputation for mobile devices is not so prominent. Thus, there may be some ambiguity involved in investing for a Toshiba Thrive, yet again great products needs to be tested on compatibility on your perspective. But we’ll talk about it and come up with a justifiable conclusion about Thrive 7. The opponent today for Thrive is Amazon Kindle Fire. This is another debut product from Amazon, which has captured the market in an alarming rate. It is rather popular as it provides access to Amazon’s Amazing content seamlessly, and all the needed functionality for an affordable price tag. We can say, it’s the cheapest tablet in the market of its caliber. Let us go into details and find out whether this edition of Kindle beats Thrive.

Toshiba Thrive 7″

Announced in September 2011, we finally could get our hands on this beauty. It has two versions that come in two capacities. The Thrive is lightweight and easy to hold while it has a Gorgeous HD touchscreen and at least that’s how Toshiba identifies it; we will see whether we can justify the statement. As the name suggests, Thrive has a 7 inch LED backlit LCD Capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors. It produces a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and a pixel density of 216 ppi, which is simply awesome. In Layman’s terms, this means that Thrive tablet produces high quality images and crisp text that you can read anywhere in any condition. It is indeed lightweight as Toshiba promises to score a 400g. We also can relate to the fact that Thrive has a Gorgeous HD screen. It has dimensions of 189 x 128.1 x 11.9 mm which is quite good. It comes with a soft, slip resistant, easy grip surface, which is an element of comfort when you hold the tablet in one hand and play with it. Thus, the Toshiba’s statement about Thrive 7 inch is not actually an overstatement.

Toshiba has included a 1GHz cortex A9 processor on top of NvidiaTegra 2 T20 chipset and a ULP GeForce GPU. The whole setup is boosted by the 1GB RAM it comes with. While this may sound frail for a tablet, it actually gives good performance benchmarks in popular tests. The Android v3.2 Honeycomb comes with the Thrive as the OS, but it’s a disappointment that Toshiba doesn’t promise the new upgrade of IceCreamSandwich for Thrive. Hopefully, Toshiba would come up with an upgrade soon. It comes in two capacities, namely 16 GB and 32 GB with the option to expand the storage with a microSD card. This can be an advantage in a device targeted at the entertainment market. If you’re a downright movie fan and wants to keep lots and lots of movies and media content in your tablet, Thrive 7 inch may serve your purpose very well.

Thrive only comes with Wi-Fi connectivity with 802.11 b/g/n and doesn’t feature GSM connectivity. This may affect the continuous connectivity since if there’s no Wi-Fi network to connect to, the user will have to suffer. But in any case, nowadays it’s easy to find Wi-Fi hotspots everywhere, so it’s not likely to be a major headache. Toshiba Thrive comes with a 5MP camera with autofocus and LED flash. This is quite a decent camera for a tablet, and it also features 720p HD video capture @ 30 frames per second. The 2MP front camera bundled with the Bluetooth connectivity; it gives a delightful user experience for the video callers. The camera also has Geo-tagging feature with Assisted GPS. Thrive also has accelerometer sensor, Gyro sensor and a Compass. The HDMI port enables to stream rich media content easily. Besides that, it comes with generic Android features and some additional software like Toshiba Service Station and File Manager along with Kaspersky Tablet Security and Need for Speed Shift. Toshiba also promises a 6 hours of battery life which is moderate and acceptable.

Amazon Kindle Fire

Amazon Kindle Fire is a device that promotes the economical tablet range with moderate performance that serves the performance. It actually is boosted by the reputation Amazon has. Unfortunately, Kindle Fire resembles Blackberry PlayBook in a subtle way. Kindle fire comes with a minimalistic design which comes in Black without much styling. It is measured to be 190 x 120 x 11.4 mm which feels comfortable in your hands. It is slightly on the hefty side since it weighs 413g. It has a 7 inch multi touch display with IPS and anti-reflective treatment. This makes sure that you can use the tablet in direct day light without much problem. Kindle Fire comes with a generic resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels and a pixel density of 169ppi. While this is not the state of the art specs, it’s more than acceptable for a tablet in this price range. We can’t complain because Kindle will produce quality images and text in a competitive manner. The screen is also chemically strengthened to be stiffer and harder than plastic which is just great.

It comes with a 1GHz Cortex A9 dual core processor on top of TI OMAP4 Chipset. The operating system is Android v2.3 Gingerbread. It also has 512MB RAM and internal storage of 8GB which is not expandable. While the processing power is good, the internal capacity may cause a problem since 8GB of storage space just isn’t enough to fulfill your media needs. It’s a shame that Amazon doesn’t feature higher capacity editions of Kindle Fire. We got to say, if you are a user with the need to keep a lot of multimedia content in hand, Kindle Fire may well disappoint in you in that context. What Amazon has done to compensate this is enabling the use of their cloud storage at any time. That is, you can download the content that you bought over and over again whenever you want. While this is highly advantageous, you still have to download the content to use it which can be a hassle.

Kindle Fire is basically a reader and a browser with extended capabilities to fulfill the needs of the user. It has the Amazon Silk browser which is fast and promises good user experience. It also supports adobe Flash content. The only blowback is that Kindle only supports Wi-Fi via 802.11 b/g/n and no GSM connectivity. On the context of reading, Kindle has added a lot of value. It has Amazon Whispersync included, which can automatically sync your library, last page read, bookmarks, notes and highlights across your devices. On Kindle Fire, Whispersync also syncs video which is quite awesome.

Kindle Fire does not come with a camera which is justifiable for the price, but the Bluetooth connectivity would have been very much appreciated. Amazon claims that Kindle enables you a continuous read of 8 hours and 7.5 hours of video playback.

Conclusion

Dealing with a conclusive statement is not an easy task for these two tablets. Both come with moderate design in an economic package. There are certain factors that make dominate each other in different arenas. For instance, for ebook reading, Kindle Fire is absolutely a pleasurable device. For gaming purpose, Toshiba Thrive is unmatchable. So it all comes down to what exactly you want from the tablet. If you’re looking for a handheld device that can handle heavy gaming and is comfortable, economic as well as gives a pleasurable user experience, Toshiba Thrive 7 inch will be your choice. If you’re into ebooks and synching your movies and everything across the devices and wants to make the maximum use of Amazon unlimited cloud space, Kindle Fire is a great bargain. But there’s also a general conclusion. If you want a tab that is generally usable for any purpose and comes in rather a cheap price tag, Amazon Kindle Fire is your choice. No tablet has beaten the price it’s been offered.