I recently purchased the Canadian version of the new Toshiba THRiVE.  Here in Canada, it just seems to be called the Toshiba Tablet.

It is thicker than any iPad or and likely thicker than any other Android tablet as well.  The benefit is that it has a full size HDMI port as well as full and mini usb ports.  It comes with a SD card slot as well to extend your storage – including compatibility with the relatively new SDXC cards which can currently hold upwards of 64GB of data.

In Canada, this is the strange numbering system they have for the model numbers of the tablet:

AT100-001 (16GB internal storage)
AT100-002  (8GB internal storage)
AT100-004 (32GB internal storage)

They jump around in the internal storage size compared to the last digits of the model number.

The strange numbering does not end there.

Last night a new OS update was pushed out by Toshiba to raise the level on my tablet from 3.1.03.5.0003 to 3.1.03.5.0006. This is all fine and dandy, however the updates for US tablets follow a different numbering pattern with the latest being 3.1.01.5.0032 which became available August 16.

Now why Toshiba would make it so difficult on themselves to support a new product with so much potential by using strange numbering systems and different patches to different parts of the world eludes me.

Let’s hope that Toshiba support for their tablet picks up and they do push out an OS update to raise Android Honeycomb from 3.1 to 3.2 soon.  Other tablet manufacturers such as ASUS have already made the leap.