Toshiba Thrive 7” Tablet

Last summer, Toshiba released its mini version of Thrive 10” and appropriately named it Thrive 7”. Its 10-inch predecessor had some baggage, such as lower than average battery life, toy-like design and a bug that keeps it from turning on after recharging. Without a doubt, Thrive 7” looks nearly identical, and it even includes some of the same specs such as the Tegra 2 chip, 16GB storage space and vanilla take on Honeycomb. So are there improvements that make this new Thrive stand out? Read on and find out.


Hardware

There's no significant difference in hardware between the new Thrive 7” and its 10” predecessor, except for the size of course. All of the key design elements have returned: metal piece surrounding the twin 2MP/5MP cameras, textured plastic back case and similar appearance. The smaller version of Thrive lacks some full-sized ports, the back cover and battery are not removable and the rear camera is now equipped with a LED flash.

The ridges on its lid makes it so much easier to cradle in either portrait or landscape mode. Still, it feels tightfisted compared to the leading tablets of a similar size in the market, such as the T-Mobile Springboard or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

At least this version amends its predecessor's lumpy design by weighing in at 0.83lbs and 0.47in thick, making it slightly lighter and as thick as Kindle Fire and a shade thinner than Nook Tablet (which is at 0.48lbs).


Display and Sound

With its 1280 x 800 pixel count, this tablet has the most densely packed display for its size. Also, it includes the same upscaling resolution + technology as the earlier 10” version. The specs may not make home videos and YouTube videos superb, but it can easily make HD movies sing. Indeed, this is one of the crispest displays you'll see in a 7” tablet, even if the Kindle Fire's IPS panel does offer brighter and wider viewing angles.


Performance

This tablet is equipped with NVIDIA's dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 SoC, 1GB RAM and a vanilla Honeycomb build, thus it doesn't really present any surprising performance. The screen is very responsive to various taps and swipes, and applications launch fairly quick. It also provides smooth graphics for fast-paced games like Need for Speed Shift.


Nonetheless, expect to experience some lags, even in the most basic situations. You may find yourself tapping shortcuts multiple times before it reacts and open the menu. Also, some noticeable slight pauses are present even in just browsing for apps in Android Market.


Battery Life

Battery life was the biggest drawback of the original Thrive and it seems like Toshiba hasn't found the answer for this problem. The Thrive 7” tablet barely runs for 4 hours and 42 minutes in a standard battery test (WiFi on, video looping), making it the poorest battery life in the market right now.