Review For You

Key Specifications

• 23-inch WLED-backlit multi-touch display with 1920 x 1080 resolution for native Full HD 1080p viewing
• 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium G620 dual-core processor (3 MB L3 cache; 1066 MHz front-side bus)
• 1 TB SATA hard drive (7200 RPM)
• 4 GB of installed DDR3 RAM (1333 MHz; 8 GB maximum)
• Intel HD Graphics for casual and mainstream gaming (supports Microsoft DirectX 10).
• 8x multi-format CD/DVD drive
• 2.0-megapixel HD webcam
• Integrated JBL speakers with 5 watts of average power per channel (10 watts total), and SRS audio enhancements
• Wireless keyboard and mouse
• Dimensions and Weight: 22.32 x 2.67 x 15.6 inches (WxDxH); 20.6 pounds

Wireless & Networking

• Wireless-N Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n) for ultra-fast connectivity to home and business networks (requires Wireless-N router to optimize speed and range).
• Next-generation Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity provides faster throughput while minimizing on power requirements. It’s compatible with new Bluetooth 3.0-enabled devices as well as backward compatible with older Bluetooth-enabled peripherals such as printers and cell phones.
• Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000)

Rear Connectivity & Expansion

• 4 standard USB 2.0 ports
• 1 HDMI port for connecting to a compatible HDTV or home theater receiver for uncompressed digital audio and video via a single cable.
• VGA video output (analog, RGB)
• SPDIF optical output plus analog audio line out
• Antenna and IR blaster connections

Side Connectivity & Expansion

• 2 standard USB 2.0 ports
• 8-in-1 memory card reader (SDXC, SD, MMC, MS, MS-PRO, xD, SDIO, SDHC)
• Microphone/headphone jacks

Hands-on Experience

The Stage That Sets Itself

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• Redesigned user interface – software navigation buttons, a first for Android smartphones, and a dedicated recent apps button to make multi-tasking easy
• Face Unlock – use state-of-the-art facial recognition to unlock Galaxy Nexus
• Android Beam™ – quickly share Web pages, apps, contacts and YouTube™ videos with friends by simply tapping two compatible phones together
• Redesigned Camera – introduces panorama mode, 1080p video capture, zero-shutter lag for instant photo capturing, and effects such as silly faces and background replacement
• People Application – browse friends, family and coworkers, see their photos in high-resolution and check their latest status updates from Google+ and other social networks
• Cloud Services – keep email, contacts, photos, music, browser bookmarks and other data synced to the cloud, available across multiple devices so customers never lose important data
• Google Music – upload up to 20,000 songs to the cloud, discover and buy new music from Android Market™, and stream it instantly on Galaxy Nexus and from the Web for free
• Google+ – Create a Google+ account right from the phone and check status updates, manage circles, quickly share updates and photos, video chat with up to ten friends with Mobile Hangouts, and chat with groups of friends with Google+ Messenger
• Support for Google Mobile™ Services – Gmail™, Google Maps™ with 3D maps and free turn-by-turn navigation, Google Earth™, Movie Studio, YouTube, syncing with Google Calendar™, a redesigned Google+ app and access to more than 300,000 apps, millions of eBooks, thousands of movies to rent, and millions of songs available to download from Android Market

Additional features:

• Dual-core 1.2 GHz application processor and HTML5 Web browser – optimized dual-core processing with Android 4.0 combined with lightning fast 4G LTE connectivity for fast downloading of graphics, applications processing and Web browsing
• Mobile Hotspot capability – share 4G LTE or 3G connection with up to 10 Wi-Fi-enabled devices
• 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with zero-shutter lag for instant photo capturing, autofocus and LED flash with full 1080p recording
• Front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video chat
• Textured soft-touch back cover – enhances the ergonomic feel and makes the phone slip-resistant
• Bluetooth® 3.0 technology – support for headset, hands-free, stereo, phonebook access, human interface device (HID) and object push for vCard and vCalendar
• 1 GB RAM and 32 GB on-board memory (actual formatted capacity will be less)
• Pricing and data packages:
• Galaxy Nexus is available now in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online at www.verizonwireless.com for $299.99 with a new two-year customer agreement.
• Customers that purchase a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung will need to subscribe to a Verizon Wireless Nationwide Talk plan beginning at $39.99 monthly access and a smartphone data package starting at $30 monthly access for 2 GB of data.

Google is making a slew of updates to the Hangouts portion of Google+, making it easier to initiate a hangout with friends and opening Hangouts On Air to more and more users. Along with the push comes an updated version of the Google+ app for Android, which allows you to initiate a Hangout directly from your smartphone. When chatting in a Google+ Messenger stream, tapping the camera icon will flip the app into hangout mode, allowing you to chat face to face with friends using the camera on your smartphone.

The updated app will be available in the Android Market by the end of the week.

[via Google]

For those who find 9- and 10-inch slates too large to carry everywhere, 7-inch tablets provide greater portability and easier one-handed use. With competitors such as Acer, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lenovo, and Samsung making 7-inch devices, Toshiba Thrive 7-inch brings some compelling favors to the party, including a high-resolution 1280 x 800 screen and an attractive design. But is this Tegra 2-toting tablet worth its relatively high $379 price?

Design

Toshiba Thrive 7-inch has a luxurious rubberized back with a textured ridge surface that’s easy to grip. Classy chrome rings the front and rear cameras. The cameras sit on the short side of the device, making it a little too easy to cover the back-facing lens with your thumb when filming with the device in landscape mode.

Toshiba Thrive 7-inch’s left long side sit a volume rocker, power button, and orientation lock switch, along with a rubber port cover that hides the mircoUSB, microSD card reader, and microHDMI out ports. A 3.5mm headphone jack is located on the tablet’s short side top, with a proprietary docking station on the bottom.

Extremely rare among tablets, the Thrive 7-inch can charge when the docking cable is connected to a PC’s USB port, though it also comes with an AC adapter that lets it juice from an outlet. However, if you want to copy files from a PC, you must connect using the microUSB port rather than the docking cable.

The Thrive 7-inch’s bright, colorful screen is the sharpest you’ll find on a 7-inch slate, thanks to its 1280 x 800 resolution. Most 7-inchers provide only 1024 x 600. That gives the Thrive an impressive pixel density of 215.63 PPI, much higher than other 7-inch tablets’ density of 169.55 PPI or 10.1-inchers’ density of 149.45 PPI. This higher density means much sharper images when you’re surfing the web, gaming, or playing videos.

The stereo speakers on the Thrive 7-inch produced reasonably accurate sound that’s loud enough to hear across a small room. However, because the speakers are mounted on the left short side, it’s easy to accidentally cover them when holding the Thrive in landscape mode.

When positioned in landscape mode, the Thrive 7-inch’s screen is the ideal size for effective thumb-typing, as each hand can reach toward the middle of the keyboard with great ease. By default, the Thrive 7-inch is set to use Android 3.2′s stock keyboard, but Swype is also available. Many users will prefer Swype’s method of forming letters by tracing lines between keys, but we were annoyed by its inability to deal with new words as it kept autocompleting to “scream” when we tried to trace “Avram.”

Though it is disabled by default, the Thrive 7-inch supports haptic feedback on either of its keyboards to provide tactile feedback as you type. With haptic feedback enabled on the stock keyboard, the Thrive 7-inch provided one of the most comfortable and accurate typing experiences we’ve had on an Android tablet.

Apart from setting the default wallpaper to an attractive red-and-black abstract pattern, Toshiba has made no changes to Google’s Android 3.2 Honeycomb operating system. Users unfamiliar with Honeycomb will appreciate its power and flexibility, but the software has a steeper learning curve compared to iOS for the iPad.

The Honeycomb OS has five customizable home screens for displaying widgets and shortcuts to your favorite apps. The lower left-hand corner of the screen contains virtual Back,Home, and Layers buttons, the latter of which shows thumbnails for each open application to make task-switching easy. Notifications appear along the bottom right, next to the time and battery icons. Tapping the battery icon also brings up a quick notifications/settings list, which lets you adjust the brightness and change the wireless without leaving your current app.

All Honeycomb tablets come with a number of Google applications that are designed to take advantage of the large screen. Both the email (POP, IMAP, Exchange) and Gmail clients have two panes, one for viewing the contents of your inbox and another for reading the current message. The stock Honeycomb browser supports multiple tabs to make switching between different sites easy. The Thrive 7-inch comes pre-loaded with Google’s Android Market, which provides access to more than 300,000 apps. (Only about 5,000 of these have been specially optimized for tablets.)

With its dual-core 1-GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 CPU and 1GB of RAM, the Thrive 7-inch packs plenty of power. Tablet was more than capable of delivering eye-popping graphics on intense 3D games such as Need for Speed Shift and Riptide GP. Playing high-quality videos, surfing the web, and taking pictures were also no problem. Like all Android tablets we’ve tested, the Thrive 7-inch suffered from occasional moments of lag when we tried to move from one task to another too quickly, but these moments were fewer than on most other tablets we’ve used.

The Thrive 7-inch performed well on all the synthetic benchmarks we threw at it. On the Benchmark CPU test, it scored a strong 3,008, well above the tablet category average of 2,680 and about on par with the Tegra 2-powered Acer Iconia Tab A100′s score of 3018. The Toshiba was just a tiny bit behind the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet (3,056) and the Amazon Kindle Fire (3,069), both of which use 1-GHz TI OMAP 4 processors. The 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos powered Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus scored a much higher 3,353.

The Thrive 7-inch scored a respectable 7,635 on An3DBench, which measures graphics prowess, far better than the 7,156 tablet category average, the 7,006 provided by the Kindle Fire, and the 7,120 offered by the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus turned in a higher 7,899, and the Acer Iconia Tab A100 scored 8,081. However, both of those tablets have lower-resolution screens than the Thrive 7-inch.

The Toshiba Thrive 7-inch lasted a mediocre time of 5 hours and 18 minutes on the LAPTOP Battery Test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 40-percent brightness. That time is well behind the tablet category average of 6 hours and 42 minutes, the Kindle Fire’s time of 7:34, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus’ time of 7:18.

The 5-megapixel rear-facing camera took mediocre pictures that were about on par with those we’ve seen from other 5-MP tablets. Colors were rather muted in a picture of orange flowers.

The 2-MP front-facing camera took dark, shadowy images of our face in low light and oversatured images when we sat under a lamp. Motion was fairly smooth when we conducted a Skype call with a Windows PC on the other end, though our picture froze a number of times.

Click to EnlargeToshiba includes very few apps to supplement Android 3.2′s built-in selection. Toshiba File Manager provides access to the device’s internal memory and any external drives or SD cards you plug in. Toshiba Media Player lets you play locally stored video files, and Toshiba Service Station checks for software updates.

The Thrive also includes a trial versions of Kaspersky Antivirus and the racing game Need for Speed Shift. QuickOffice HD lets you open, but not edit, Office documents. PrinterShare allows you to print to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth printers. Hardwood games, including Backgammon, Euchre, Solitaire, Hearts, and Spades, are also included.