Eagle eyed geeks have noticed that Amazon in the States (not elsewhere such as tech hungry UK) have published pre-order pages for the Toshiba Thrive. This is an Android 3.1 tablet.
The RRP starts at $429.99 and that gets you 10.1″ high-res LED screen with Toshiba’s auto-adjusting brightness, duel front and back cameras, two speakers (again with clever Tosh tech), one 2.0 USB port, one mini USB, one HDMI and one SD card slot.
I care a lot about battery life and the Thrive is expected to come in at a “talk time” of about 7 hours but perhaps the key thing is that the battery will be removable.
LaptopMag got their hands on one and here’s a quick video demo.
I’m curious to what fellow gamers think? Do you tabletop RPG with laptops now? Can you imagine Android tablets replacing them (or, of course, the iPad). I certainly can. The laptops can be great; especially for mutual note taking via Google Docs but players tend to vanish behind screens. I think tablets will solve that problem. You could even ponder a future in which GMs have upgraded to a newer tablet and the old model is used to display a grid map for minis to move around on.
