Toshiba today unveiled the Toshiba Thrive 7 - the newest addition to its Thrive family of tablets. This compact model has nothing to do with the slimline, 10.1-inch AT200 tablet that the company showed at the IFA trade show in Berlin in September 2011, but it does underscore how quickly technologies and designs in the tablet market are evolving. This 7-inch model is due out in December 2011.

Toshiba Thrive 7: The compact and light Toshiba Thrive 7 offers a bright display and a good set of connections.

The Toshiba Thrive 7 -- yes, the 7” appears to be part of its official name for now--is the first truly 7-inch model announced with a high-resolution, 1280-by-800-pixel display, offering 225 pixels per inch. Samsung already announced at IFA that its Galaxy Tab 7.7 would have the same resolution, but that model has a 7.7-inch display. For some perspective, consider that this is also the resolution currently available on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1--but because the new Toshiba model packs the pixels into a smaller display, the pixels-per-inch figure is higher, which eliminates the dot-matrix effect that often plagues Android tablets.