 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. I 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-size ports surrounding the tablet, but there is a decent selection. On the left-hand side, there's a port flap hiding a mini-USB, a microSD card slot, and a mini-HDMI port. On the top, there's also a 3.5mm headphone jack. While 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 1280x800 resolution is really crisp on the 7-inch display with a high pixel density that's really good for reading. Toshiba's kept the same camera spec. 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+. For $379, the Toshiba Thrive 7-inch isn't a bad choice and you get one of the best displays I've seen on a 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.