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I am usually not an early adapter of electronic gadgets. I like to wait out and watch the market and decide my purchase depending on the acceptance and longevity of the tool. I don’t like to be first one to stand in line to get their first Ipad or IPhone. That’s just not me. The real reason behind it, I am not too crazy about gadgets unless I really need them. That’s why I took enough time to figure out the better tablet for our need not just for the sake of having one.

Requirement
Like any purchase, I usually list down the need and real objective of the tool and goal its going to accomplish. For tablet, I was thinking like we have a laptop which I recently bought and why do we need a tablet. I need one to check and reply emails quickly instead of booting my laptop every time, check on some business websites while talking to clients over the phone, quickly upload photos from my camera to websites and finally want to hook up to my HDTV to watch movies. That’s just my quick list. Obviously not to mention my wife would like to check out internet for cooking videos and my son(5 year old) would love to play his Angry bird game on a bigger screen than iphone.

Research
After researching for almost 3-4 months and checking out prizes, I finally decided to go for Toshiba Thrive. Why not Ipad? Because I don’t want to depend on laptop or desktop to transfer my files from and to tablet. Tablet has to work independently like mini-laptop. IPAD doesn’t have HDMI port, no SD and USB port for quick photo transfers. It is expensive as well. It is out of my list. Other tablets like Galaxy Tab, Motorola XOOM all are good and sleek but bit expensive and doesn’t support lots of ports which I was looking. Acer Iconoia and Azus Transformer, they were on the final list but Toshiba scored it because of his reputation and reviews.

Result – My Pick
It has been few weeks since we got the tablet. We all got good use of it so far. I installed decent apps, upgraded to HoneyComb 3.2 without much hazzle and has short learning curve to pick up on Andriod. I downloaded few free books from Amazon, watched movies plugged to my HDTV. My wife uses for chatting, quick internet check and watching cooking videos. My son not only plays but also uses to do his homework on websites. I was able to easily transfer video and audio files back and forth from different machines to tablet without need of software/tool.

Check out the below video about a quick preview of the tablet,



In conclusion, I would say we all love it so far. Since I got it on sale for $309 (16GB), its worth the money and hope it will be a handy tool for us for couple years. It will for you if you are looking for all the different ports without paying big bucks. Unless you are diehard Apple phone, I would really recommend to give Android and Thrive a try!!!