Toshiba’s Ultrabook: any port in a storm?

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

On my way in to the office this morning, I saw an advert for the Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook. It was, pretty much, just a photo of the device. Evidently Toshiba reckons that, in this case, seeing is believing, and it’s certainly a striking image. Here’s the picture, as helpfully reproduced on the Toshiba website:

The small amount of text accompanying the picture emphasises the care that’s gone into the design. In particular, it mentions that, despite its thinness, the Z830 has “all the ports you’ll need.”

Looking a little more closely at the picture, however, I’m not quite so certain that’s true:

So, that’s all the ports you’ll need… so long as you can fit your Kensington lock into a round socket – and cram your USB devices into a card slot.

Toshiba AT200 tablet review: first look

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Another day at IFA 2011, and yet another launch of a brand-new Android tablet. This time it’s Toshiba’s turn with the AT200: a 10.1in tablet that can (currently, at least) lay claim to being the lightest 10.1in tablet in the world.

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Toshiba mini NB550D review: first look

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

The big news about the Toshiba mini NB550D netbook is the processor inside: no Intel Atom here, but AMD’s all new C-50 – a dual-core chip running at 1GHz.

And AMD is very enthusiastic about the platform as a whole, describing the combination of processor, chipset and graphics chip as an APU: accelerated processing unit.

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Toshiba Folio 100 tablet review: first look

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

After traipsing around the semi-completed halls of Berlin’s IFA show, it seems like every manufacturer under the sun has decided to release a tablet. Toshiba is no exception, but its Folio 100 tablet has decided to tread a slightly different path to its rivals. The 10.1in form factor and Android 2.2 OS come as no surprise, but Intel and Qualcomm don’t get a look in – instead Nvidia’s Tegra 2 takes centre stage.

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Toshiba AC100: exclusive screenshots

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

As I mentioned in my preview of the Toshiba AC100 last week, the adapted version of Google Android 2.1 powering the mobile internet device is still very much under development. But Toshiba has recently sent me some more screenshots of it in action.

1. The home screen

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Toshiba Libretto W100 dual-screen laptop: first-look review

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Microsoft’s Courier tablet might be languishing somewhere in a Redmond wheelie-bin, but Toshiba’s Libretto W100 has turned the keyboard-free concept into reality. With dual 7in touchscreens, a miniature netbook form factor and no sign of Intel’s weakling Atom, the Libretto takes a daring stride into the future.

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Toshiba Portégé R700: first-look review

Monday, June 21st, 2010

While the Toshiba Libretto W100 and AC100 are both radically different products to what has gone before, the R700 treads more established ground. This is the successor to Toshiba’s Portégé R600 and R500, both of which were targeted at top executives from generously endowed companies.

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Toshiba AC100 mobile internet device: first-look review

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Toshiba has just announced the AC100 mobile internet device, and we were fortunate enough to grab one for an extended test over this weekend. While Tosh’s implementation of Google Android is still in development – the AC100 will be released in August – the hardware is final and we were able to get a clear idea of what the AC100 would be like as a day-to-day companion.

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The £12 laptop with the solid state disk

Friday, June 4th, 2010

The more seductive the toys they put in front of me, the more devious I get at strategies to avoid their siren call. Flying in and out of Zurich airport, I developed the Red Watch Excuse: I only buy watches with red faces, which are very rare, therefore I can merrily ignore all the very sexy, very expensive watches with non-red faces.

I wrote here about upgrading my old (and horribly unreliable, until it was repaired) MacBook Pro laptop with a solid-state drive: this was another Red Watch trick, to stop me looking at other, later, sexier MacBooks. Now, I’m carrying an HP nc4400, because it’s small enough that I can ignore pretty piano-black netbooks, and it runs Vista, which hasn’t done anything nasty to me yet and helps me to avoid buying one copy of Windows 7 per laptop… You begin to see the pattern here.

So when the iPad seemed imminent, I went back to my basic principles. I had already rescued my oldest laptop with a Compact Flash disk upgrade, after being obliged to fall back on it because it has a genuine, no-messing 9-pin serial port. Lots of switches and routers use a serial connection as part of the “I’m a brick, fix me” mode they occasionally enter: so replacing the 13GB rotating iron platter drive (c. 1997) with an 8GB solid state Compact Flash made perfect sense. However, for blog purposes this job is low on good evidence, because Tecra 8000’s put their disks inside dent-prone alloy carrier shells, so you can’t easily see what I was up to.

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Toshiba Satellite Pro S500: first look review

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

The first thing to strike you on picking up the Toshiba Satellite Pro S500 is just how very big it is; its 2.5kg weight comes as something of a surprise. It looks more like a laptop with a 17in screen than the 15.6in screen that’s actually inside, and this feeling is emphasised by the fact a numeric keypad is squeezed to the right of the traditional keyboard.

While this does have its benefits, particularly for power users of Excel, it takes a little while to get used to the arrangement; for example, finding the Backspace key when typing quickly. Toshiba compensates for this by making this key, and the right Shift key, nice and large – possibly the biggest hindrance will be the half-width Enter key.

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