Toshiba newly announced 10.1 Android tab is hitting the US

We caught wind of a pretty beefy looking tablet coming up over the horizon from Toshiba at CES 2011 and it reared its head again a couple of weeks back. Twitter even gave us a name courtesy of some chatty actors starring in what was expected to be its TV ad debut, the ‘Thrive’ and now said mysterious tab is officially here, almost.

The Thrive is now the confirmed name for Toshiba big tablet and pre-sales kick off as soon as next week! Its one of the thicker tabs, relatively speaking at 0.62-inch but thats not without its benefits. The biggest difference is the inclusion of both a full-sized USB port and a full-sized HDMI along the bottom plus this thing just looks sturdy as a result. Spec sheets still quote the Thrive as running on Android Honeycomb 3.0 but Toshiba are now saying that it will ship with 3.1 instead so its a win there too.

Hardware is solid and for the price, sits nicely in amongst some similarly specced candidates. For $429 you get a 10.1-inch tab running Honeycomb 3.1, a Tegra 2 powered interior with 8GB of internal storage and an IPS display. For $479 you get twice the internal storage and for $579 you get a full 32GB too. For the fashion conscious amongst you prospective buyers, you can also buy a selection of colored back panels at $19.99 each and underneath you also have access to a removable battery, which is handy.

Toshiba UK twitter account said:

So a somewhat cryptic, but positive response, its as usual a matter of watch this space but that certainly did not sound like a no, guesses would be that if the Thrive were to come to the UK, it would probably come to the rest of Europe as well.