Thrive impressions

I have played around with the Thrive a bit and thought that I would share my experience so far. The platform seems somewhat stable without too much glitchiness, but not up to what modern Windows users are used to. Google Earth crashed, but they have since patched the software. I have downloaded a free game that had problems, and the Market App crashed on me once.

After startup (which takes longer than I expected), you see the center of five home screens where you can place Apps, Widgets, Bookmarks, and a few other things. You can swipe between these home screens, and a white outline will show you where the next home screen is actually located. Personally, I don’t fully understand why the locations of home screens are laid out in a linear fashion. I would rather swipe up to a home screen than left twice.

Below the home screens and Apps is a bar with system buttons. This bar is essentially monochrome with a bluish tint. Aesthetically speaking, I think that they could have done better.

The tablet can be rotated, and the home screens and any Apps supporting rotation will adjust. Since programs can be built for certain orientations, not all Apps support rotation. Obviously, the Home screens will rotate. The Toshiba logo before loading Android, however, is always portrait. I have primarily used the tablet in landscape, so it feels kind of like it’s booting sideways.

The touch interface relies primarily on certain types of input. Opening apps and activating most controls requires a tap. Double-tapping can activate zoom, although it is not widely used. A long press (locks in with a haptic response) opens a context menu or enables dragging. Pinching can be used to zoom in and out. Swiping your finger across the screen is used to scroll.

Before I go too far, I should point out that Android allows you to encrypt the contents of your tablet (using a PIN or password). It takes time to encrypt, but it was a lot faster than most estimates that I have seen. This might be because I took care of it early, so I didn’t have much data.

The library of Apps are still somewhat limited, especially for quality tablet-optimized Apps. For example, the official Flickr App does not support the Thrive (I don’t think it supports Honeycomb). It’s actually kind of nice that the browser tells you if your device is compatible (the Market App doesn’t even list Apps that are incompatible). Amazon allows you to register your device, and they can also tell you if your device is compatible.

Two Apps that I have purchased are not finished. One is a DSLR controller (Beta). The other is Minecraft (Alpha) because I felt that I had to have a game. I have also grabbed a productivity App, a free GPS logger, and several games. The Thrive comes with a File Manager to move files between internal and external storage. While I am not spending anywhere as much time with my Thrive as my computer, I have definitely tested some Apps.

The Apps maintain the bar with system buttons at the bottom of the screen unless they try to utilize the full screen. If that happens, the system button will turn into dots until you use them. There are three buttons there that you can find consistently as well as a clock and notifications.

The first button is a back button. This is pretty straightforward in the sense that it can be used to go back a screen, back to an App that you just left, or sometimes close a screen that pops up (since it views the App + the pop-up as a separate screen). The back button will be replaced with a close keyboard button whenever the keyboard is displayed.

Since I’m talking about the keyboard, I should probably mention how it works. In short, it opens whenever you tap a text box. It gives you a simplified QWERTY layout. To view numbers and symbols, you hit a key on the left side. You can type at a reasonable speed, but there is a lag in recording the keystrokes. In other words, you will frequently find the text to be a couple letters behind what you have typed. I have heard that you can install alternative keyboards that address the lag.

I know that this text is getting a little jumpy, but I also wanted to point out another component of data input. If you find a list box (where you have to pick an entry from a list of pre-populated items) which are fairly common on webpages, you really only have an option of scrolling (sometimes requiring several swipes) to find the item that you want to select. This is partially because the keyboard takes up so much of the screen that you really can’t get both. Hitting the starting letter is a real timesaver on a typical computer, but you can’t get that with an Android tablet. Living in Washington, it can be annoying to have to scroll to the bottom of any list of states. I kind of wish that they could store and detect states for me in order to simplify the process.

Going back to the system buttons, the second is a home button. This takes you back to a home screen where you can find Apps and whatever you want to access outside of open Apps.

The third system button is an Apps button. The idea behind this is that you can easily go back to open and recently used Apps. This list scrolls, so any system that has been on for awhile will likely have a fairly significant list of Apps.

This brings up another bizarre issue. Most Apps don’t have commands to actually close. My understanding is that this has to do with the design of Android. The platform was not originally meant for any real multitasking. Instead, According to Android’s list of open Apps, however, you can actually see these Apps are shown as open and running services. While I have not yet run out of system resources, this is something that should probably be addressed. At the very least, I would like to be able to drag Apps that I’m not using off of the list of Apps from the App button.

I know that I said that there were three, but that’s because there are only three that are always there. Some Apps add a menu button. This can obviously be used in different ways for different Apps, so I’m not going to go into too much detail. I will point out that some apps have a menu button in the upper-right corner instead of using this button. I suspect that those Apps were built for older versions of Android.

The power button is not used the same way that you would use a desktop computer. Pressing the power button puts the device into sleep mode. Holding the power button is used to shut down the power. Some people setup their desktops in this way, and the settings are common for notebook computers. It may not seem that different, but we are actually comparing a hard shutdown to a soft shutdown. In other words, holding the power button on the Thrive opens a pop-up that asks you if you would like to turn off your tablet.

How do you force a hard shutdown? I have heard of people removing the battery. I’m not entirely sure how you would pull it off on other models. Perhaps draining the battery would work.

Now let me get into some specific issues that I have with some of the Apps. Let’s start with productivity. I downloaded the main App for Documents to Go (free version and required for the full version). I couldn’t exactly test the editing features. The same thing could be said for the version of QuickOffice that shipped with the Thrive. I went online and looked at what people thought about the best productivity Apps. It seems like Documents to Go is really supposed to be the best.

Just so you know, I have also tried out the Google Docs App. I really don’t like it because it’s not exactly friendly when it comes to editing formulas. Accessing Google Docs with your browser is better, at least when it doesn’t detect Android and give you the lower quality mobile version of the website.

One thing that I have learned about myself over the years is that I am not very good at making decisions that lack basis (heads or tails?). Letting Excel make decisions for me has become a common occurrence. These decisions rely on randomization.

Documents to Go does not have a Randbetween function. Fortunately, that can easily be addressed by using the Rand function and multiplying by the number of choices (and ignoring numbers after the decimal). At least it should be easily addressed. Documents to Go doesn’t even include the Rand function.

The Gallery App that comes with Android also has some problems. Specifically, where’s the metadata? There is an option to filter by tags, but tags are not loading from the pictures. Also, I want to be able to tell who took pictures when I’m going through a USB drive. I don’t even see an option to view details. I’m sure that there’s an App somewhere that provides access to metadata, but it seems like a serious oversight to me.

One last thing. The Thrive can definitely be classified as bulky. To me, you should be able to hold a tablet in one hand and control it with the other. It’s possible with the Thrive, but it’s size and weight makes it awkward. However, there are definite advantages to the size of the screen. The soft keyboard feels like it is sized properly. I have a hard time imagining entering text on a more compact keyboard. Also, I have accidentally opened new tabs in the browser instead of closing tabs. The accuracy of the touchscreen is pretty good, but it’s hard to imagine what happens if the screen is compacted any further.

In the end, I bought this tablet for a purpose. I want to be able to take it with me on vacations. I want to be able to backup pictures onto a hard drive away from home. I want to be able to view my pictures on a screen larger than my camera offers. I want to be able to take notes in more ways than just writing in a notebook. I want to be able to minimize my direct contact with my camera on some tricky shots. While I’m not quite to the point of using the Thrive to control my DSLRs (which definitely appears possible with this model), this tablet clearly meets all of my other demands.