14 DAY TRIAL // There is fashionably late and there is woefully late, and Toshiba's Thrive tablet is veering dangerously close to the second type, at least in those regions where it has failed to make its appearance.
It looks like the Motorola XOOM is not the only one being plagued by slowdowns to the release and update schedule.
Nevertheless, where the XOOM only lacks an update to the operating system in certain regions, the Toshiba Thrive has bigger things to worry about.
Consumers from some countries have already see the product arrive. Indeed, the Thrive even got an update to the operating system, one that was meant to fix certain issues with the sleep mode, among other things.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Canada, where not only has the product failed to arrive, it actually got delayed.
Where it was supposed to make its appearance around today or tomorrow (at least according to a number of rumors that came out before now), it is now listed on Future Shop with the shipment date of August 19.
At least pre-orders can already be set and the price of $429.99 is actually a fairly accessible one in a field where the standard tag is around $500.
As for specifications, 8 GB of built-in NAND Flash storage, along with a 10.1-inch LCD display (1,280 x 800 pixels resolution) and various I/O and network options are handled by the NVIDIA Tegra 2 ARM platform, backed by 1 GB of RAM.
Meanwhile, customers that would like something less expensive can check out Archos' $250 10-inch model (though it is not selling in many places and has Android Gingerbread) or the HP TouchPad (now for under $400), though the 4G version is coming so some might just choose to wait a while longer (for a significantly higher price point, alas).