Toshiba THRiVE 7 Pro Reviews

The Toshiba Thrive 7-inch occupies a useful middle ground in two respects: As a 7-inch tablet, it provides a much larger screen than an Android phone, but it is much more portable and comfortable to hold than a 10-inch tablet. As a fully featured Android tablet, it offers more productivity features (along with full access to the Android Market) than a specialized 7-inch tablet such as the NOOK or the Kindle Fire that costs less but offers inferior specs and functionality. But the Thrive is not all work and no play. Compared to a Windows tablet, it boasts much better usability (as in, night and day) while providing access to an app store for all manner of productivity and entertainment pursuits. It's not without its faults, however. For starters, the low-end 16GB version cost $379, which is nearly double the price you'll pay for a Kindle Fire. Further, its small battery runs for only so long and is annoyingly not replaceable, and the tablet has trouble maintaining a wireless signal if you stray the shortest distance away from your router. Lastly, the rear-facing camera is in a terrible spot. None of the above issues are deal breakers, and on the whole, we love the look and feel of the Toshiba Thrive 7-inch, its high-resolution display, and the fact that Toshiba didn't strip out the connectivity options when fitting the tablet into the 7-inch form factor.

The second installment of the Toshiba Thrive story ends better than the first, but that isn’t really saying much. The nice, pixel-dense 1280 x 800-resolution display can only do so much for this $349 tablet; it just isn’t enough to combat the creaking and poor build quality, the camera placement, and the lagging performance and battery life. The $399 Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus may have a weaker display and TouchWiz skinning, but it’s a better, more well-rounded option for those looking for a 7-inch Honeycomb tablet. Of course, if you're looking for a 7-inch tablet for just basic browsing, media consumption, and access to a handful of Android apps, the $199 Kindle Fire will more than suffice. And there you have it: Toshiba’s going to have to think a lot harder about what progress really is to thrive in this new and fierce tablet market.

It's hard to say where the Thrive 7" fits in, or if it belongs at all. On the one hand, it's $130 to $180 more expensive than budget tabs like the Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet, and yet it offers little to justify its higher price: it isn't significantly thinner or lighter, its battery life craps out hours earlier and the build quality feels flimsier. The biggest advantage, so far as we're concerned, is that it runs Honeycomb and is ICS-ready. Even then, you may as well resign yourself to spending an additional $20 on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which is slimmer, lighter, faster, longer-lasting and better-made. Regardless of what you're willing to spend, though, the Thrive 7" has issues, and that high-res display isn't nearly enough to make up for them.

Ultimately, the same cast of characters face the Toshiba Thrive 7 competitively, as did the 10-inch version of the Thrive earlier this year, with two notable exceptions; in the high-end it's Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus and in the low-end it's Amazon's Kindle Fire. For about the same price (a $20 premium), the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus offers the very potent dual core 1.2GHz Samsung Exynos SoC that proved itself faster in all of our benchmarks versus the NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC (System on a Chip) that is powering so many Honeycomb slates these days, including the Thrive 7. The Galaxy Tab 7 Plus also sports Samsung's gorgeous PLS display technology and is significantly thinner, though it doesn't have near the connectivity options of the Thrive 7's assortment of micro-sized ports. The Kindle Fire, of course, is almost a full $200 cheaper than the Thrive 7, but also has a generally lower-end TI OMAP dual-core chip, with only the tablet's docking connector to support USB 2.0 connectivity, only 8GB of storage and 512MB of RAM. Not to mention it runs Android 2.3 and is partially hamstrung without access to the Android Marketplace, though obviously it's ripe for rooting.

The Toshiba Thrive 7 is a reasonably good tablet with very nice display, a decent processor, and the ability to run a wide range of Android apps. It’s more portable than the larger 10 inch tablets that have flooded the market over the last year and with a screen that’s just a tiny bit bigger than those found on most eReaders, it’s a great size for reading books.But with a starting price of $379, it’s hard to justify picking up a Thrive 7 over some of the alternatives. While the Thrive 7 offers more storage than the Kindle Fire, more expansion options than the NOOK Tablet, and a higher resolution display than either device, it also costs nearly twice as much as Amazon’s tablet, and over $100 more than a NOOK Tablet.

The Toshiba Thrive is technically proficient, with a good screen, decent connectivity and a design that, while not slick, feels comfy in-hand. However, it has arrived unfashionably late and lower-cost rivals are on our doorstep. It's better than the other 7in Honeycomb tablets we've reviewed, but we can't summon all that much enthusiasm for this water-treading tab.

The Toshiba Thrive 7 is an average tablet with a great screen, but its poor battery life and lack of compelling features make it hard to justify choosing it over some of the better 7-inch tablets out there.