Gadgetory

well this is Joanna for the verge and this is the toshiba thrive 7-inch which is the baby brother to the original 10-inch thrive and obviously this one has a 7-inch display making it a bit thinner and lighter than the original actually still really like the design of this tablet I like the rubber back and sort of the ribbed feel of it but unfortunately this one feels a little bit more cheaply made the back is very plasticky and you can actually hear creaking on it when you hold it tightly in hand unlike the original thrive there aren't full-sized ports surrounding the tablet but there is a decent selection on the left-hand side there is a port flap hiding a mini USB a micro SD card slot at a mini HDMI port on the top there's also a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack well I do have some issues with the make of the tablet especially that back that I mentioned before I do really like the screen quality the display is really bright and it also has a really good resolution the 1280 x 800 resolution is really crisp on the 7-inch display with a high pixel density that's really good for reading Toshiba's kept to the same cam respect there's a 5 megapixel camera on the back and a 2 megapixel camera on the front but unfortunately the quality of the pictures is pretty bad and on top of that the shutter speed is really slow it actually takes more like four seconds for the camera to snap a photo and also the placement of it on the back makes it really hard to keep your fingers from getting in the shot the camera isn't the only place you can see the sluggishness of this tablet while the internals are pretty powerful the Android Honeycomb operating system can be slow at times especially when swiping through menus and opening applications it is even slower than some of the other honeycomb tablets I've tested like the galaxy tab 7 plus for 379 dollars the toshiba thrive 7 inches in a bad choice and you get one of the best displays I've seen on the 7-inch tablet but for a little bit more you can get the samsung galaxy tab 7 which has better performance and better battery life and at half the price if all you want to do is consume content on a 7-inch tablet the Kindle Fire is also a good alternative you