Refurbished - Toshiba 8GB Thrive 10" Tablet w/ Android 3.2 Honeycomb OS, 1GHz Dual-Core, WiFi - $200 w/ FS

One of the best forums to find out about rooting and customizing (plus lots of info about the Thrive) are the Toshiba Thrive Forums [thriveforums.org]. The Thrive is easy to root and unroot, very responsive, big and easy to read. Rooting, modding and overclocking are extremely effective - I had mine running just over 1.4 GHz safely and it is fast.


You cannot put apps on the external SD card unless you root the tablet and use Link2SD [google.com], but you can use the external SD for videos, music and books. You are limited to about 3GB for apps on both the 8GB and 16GB - not sure why Toshiba worked it that way, but that's still a good bit of storage unless you download a lot of massive games. Even Link2SD can be a little weird when setting up, but if you don't have a huge amount of data, you should be fine. Hook up external hard drives and flash drives with movies and music and you don't have to put them on the internal storage.

Full sized HDMI out lets you easily hook a normal HDMI cable to any HDTV.

Hook up a Bluetooth reader like this BAFX ELM 327 Diagnostic Scan Tool [amazon.com] to a 1996 and up car, download the free Torque Lite [google.com] or $4.95 Torque Pro [google.com] app on Google Play, and you can check your car's diagnostics while you go! This setup works GREAT with my 1996 Honda Accord - I put the Thrive in its folio holder wedged onto the dashboard to check speed, revs, etc. and to check and clear Check Engine light fault codes.

The GPS is a little strange at times, but use FasterFix [google.com] to lock in on the satellites quickly. Once you do that, apps like NavFree [google.com] and Sygic [google.com] are good offline GPS apps to get you where you need to go (Sygic gives a 7 day free trial; NavFree is free). Other GPS apps have to have a data connection to function well.