First looks: Toshiba Satellite P500

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

The Toshiba Satellite P500 is a big laptop. Not a-little-larger-than-a-typical-laptop big, more size-of-the-universe big. Take a look at the photo if you don’t believe me: this is a kind and perfectly normal-sized lady at the Toshiba booth at IFA Berlin, yet it dwarfs her.

“It’s not funny,” she said, having held the laptop for 30 seconds as I fiddled with the camera, “this laptop is heavy.”

That’s also undeniably true, but then the Satellite P500 wasn’t built to be carried between home and office. This is a machine designed to entertain, and Toshiba packs in all the hi-tech goodies you can think of to make it a pleasure to use. (more…)

Can companies be trusted over green promises?

Friday, September 4th, 2009

I’ve just come out of an “Eco” briefing with Sony at IFA, and it should be no surprise at all that they’re banging their own eco drum pretty fiercely. But, in that, they’re absolutely no different from all the other manufacturers at this show.

Sharp, I’m told, declared themselves “world eco champions”, and Toshiba dedicated a number of slides in their press conference about the fact they were aiming to “improve our eco-efficiency by ten times” by 2050.

And there’s another thing all these companies have in common too. They not only want you to replace existing products, they want you to actually own more electronic products. Can these two competing demands ever live with each other?

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First look: Toshiba’s loudmouth laptop

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

We’ve recently taken delivery of a Toshiba Qosmio X300-13W, which has waded into the Labs and stomped all over practically every other notebook we’ve got in at the moment. While X300-13W isn’t a name that gives much away, a quick glance at the picture on the left will tell you, instantly, that this isn’t a shy, retiring business laptop or a cheap netbook.

Not so. Instead, it’s the loudest, shoutiest and most enthusiastic desktop replacement that we’ve ever seen.

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, February 13th, 2009

The big launch of the week was AMD’s move to its AM3 platform. Finally allowing the use of DDR3 with its CPUs, we received a motherboard and several new triple and quad-core processor models, which we promptly fired through our intensive benchmark suite with pretty impressive results.

At the more budget end of the scale we saw HP’s Compaq CQ2000, a beautifully designed small-form-factor PC with a 20in TFT for a mouth-watering price of just £286 exc VAT. We’ve seen cheap mini-PCs and nettops before, but this is the first we’d really want in our living room.

We also reviewed Toshiba’s latest business model, the Tecra R110-112, which came in bright white with a vast array of security features and reasonable power too. (more…)

Battery Chicken

Friday, February 13th, 2009

I confess; I’m chicken. I need a new battery for my Toshiba Satellie U200, so off I went and Googled for it. This is what online shopping should be for, after all: I can type in the part number of the laptop or the battery and get many pages of hits, all striving to garner my business with promises of guarantees, instant shipping, perfect compatibility… what could possibly go wrong

Well, take a look at pictures of the U200 Tosh. It has overhung screen hinges – by which I mean, when the screen is opened any further than about 50 degrees, the base of the screen starts to drop over the back of the laptop. By the time it is open at a sensible laptop viewing angle, the screen base is aligned with the bottom of the main body of the unit, and completely obscures the rear of the laptop. That’s why all the plugs are on the sides and even the front: the back is completely occupied by the battery.

So… why is someone selling this? – at first blush it looks like a jolly good idea. Extended battery runtime is an excellent concept, and hanging outside the form-factor of a laptop is a tried and tested way to get it. Having a standard battery dock in many models of laptop no doubt helps manufacturers keep prices down, too – but as with so much “should be easy” stuff on the web, it looks like this is one of those howlers it’s all too easy to get caught by.

I actually sat here for a few minutes, waggling the screen of the Tosh to and fro for a while, trying to figure out if the lid could possibly miss the bump on the back of the battery – then I realised it was much easier to confess to moral turpitude here and wait for someone to recommend a battery replacement website which actually knows what they are selling.

(by the way, no special criticism is intended for laptopbatterystore.co.uk – they are just one of the hundreds of sites all apparently using the same copatibility parts matrix to offer the same batteries for the same laptops)

All the week’s reviews

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Free laptops for life, monitors sprouting mini offspring, Toshiba’s first netbook and an open source media player from the chaps behind Firefox – it’s been a busy week for reviews.

Firefox vs iTunes

Surely the most interesting release of the week was from Mozilla. Although its been in development for a few years, Songbird finally saw an official release, with a media player and browser in one. Darien was hopeful it could finally give him an alternative to iTunes: “Since it’s open source, freely extensible and unfettered by corporate interests, Songbird’s future looks bright.” Try it and let us know what you think.

Not just for christmas

Fujitsu stole the headlines with its offer of a free laptop every three years forever, and Jon reckons “if you’re a cheapskate and don’t mind being tied to one brand for the rest of your life it’s got to be worth looking into”. If the best you can get is the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7720, however, you’ll probably be turning them down on their kind offer.

Dell’s Inspiron 1318 is a much more tempting proposition, with a price tag of just £383 exc VAT putting it dangerously close to netbook territory. Sasha was impressed by the ”portable chassis with great ergonomics and fine battery life – a potent combination”, and more than enough to earn it an award. 

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, November 28th, 2008

In a week dominated by laptops, we also saw ATI launch its latest dual-GPU monster, Getac earn an award for another rugged wonder, and a rather niche new addition to the Sling family.

Laptop frenzy

We were intrigued by the Packard Bell EasyNote BG45-U-300, a portable laptop to take on the netbooks at less than £300 exc VAT – just £50 more than our A-Listed Samsung NC10. Matt reckons it’s perfect “if you’re after a little more oomph and a higher-resolution screen” than a netbook.

If your budget is significantly higher the UK’s first review of Toshiba’s brand new Portégé R600 ultraportable may be more your bag. Tim reckons it can trounce the Macbook Air on most specs – and he’s the editor so we can’t argue. It’s not the prettiest but “its price, integrated 3G modem and low weight all work in its favour.”

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First look: Toshiba Qosmio F50-10Z

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

While we have seen a trickle of Centrino 2 laptops arriving in the PC Pro Labs of late – the Sony VAIO FGN-FW11ZU and Advent 5511 are two of the more recent examples – the new Toshiba Qosmio F50-10Z has to be one of the most exciting, at least based on first impressions.

The keyboard, for instance, is surrounded by a chrome border which extends to the pair of unusually-shaped mouse buttons, and the panel of touch-sensitive controls above the keyboard glow white, rather than the more reserved blue we’ve seen from Dell’s XPS laptops.

Audio is provided by a pair of harmon/kardon speakers – similar to those in the Toshiba Satellite P300 – and volume is altered by a circular control just below the keyboard. Predictably, it’s chrome-covered and bordered with bright white light. There’s also a huge Qosmio logo that arches its way across the lid, as if you didn’t know that this extroverted notebook had been designed, from the ground up, to entertain.

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What’s in a name?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Abbreviations are great, aren’t they? BBC, DVD, HSBC, DVLA, GCSE. Why use normal words when you can take almost as long to recite them as letters instead?

Of course, some conveniently shorten into a series of letters that can actually be said as a single, new word. Think acronyms like NASA, SCUBA, laser. Think VAIO.

Today I read of Sony’s redefinition of the famous VAIO brand, and it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what it had stood for since its creation.

Very Attractive If Overpriced, perhaps? (more…)

Just in: Nokia E71

Monday, June 16th, 2008

I was quite impressed by the handfeel* of the Toshiba Portégé G710 when I reviewed it last week, but it is as nothing to the E71. This drop-dead sexy beast is satisfyingly weighty, with the metal chassis perfectly fitting its boardroom looks.

So far, I also prefer the Nokia’s slightly larger keys. There’s no space between them, so theoretically you could accidentally nudge the wrong one, but this hasn’t yet been an issue.

Another big advantage is speed, with the Symbian OS here proving much, much more responsive than the Toshiba G710 running Windows Mobile 6.

One of Nokia’s biggest selling points, though, is ease-of-setup. Just enter your email address and password, the marketing chief claimed, and then worry no more – everything would just work. And with support for “thousands” of ISPs, it’s more likely than not that it will.

I tried it with my Gmail account, but initially hit a problem with the setup routine – it was using Vodafone Live! to connect rather than the usual Vodafone internet access point. Once I’d corrected this, though, it worked like a dream. Well, a slightly dull dream involving access to email via a phone.

I’ll keep on using the phone over the next few days, so look out for the full review soon.

*Handfeel. n. 1 Like mouthfeel, but in the hand.