Product Reviews

Toshiba's Satellite U300-113 is a sleek ultra-portable laptop that weighs a little less than 2kg. It's eye-catching thanks to a classy silver-and-black case with a deep blue lid and the bright blue status lights that this year's Satellites are sporting. It looks expensive, but at £700 it's pretty reasonable, proving you don't have to pay a premium for a laptop light enough to carry around all the time.

The Satellite's slight frame does mean it won't strain your shoulders, but one side effect of this is its slightly disappointing battery life - no worse than many other budget laptops, but too short to set off for a day's travel without half an eye out for the next mains socket. It lasted barely two hours while playing a DVD, but did better in our light usage test, going for just over three hours, enough for a short-haul flight. We've seen ultra-portables last as long as five hours, including Samsung's Q45 (search for 122308), which weighs the same and costs only a little more . At least you won't have to wait around for the battery to recharge: it took only an hour and 14 minutes.

Short memory

We were surprised to see the Satellite arrive with only 1GB of RAM. While this is enough for everyday tasks, you'll want more to run several applications at once or tackle memory-intensive tasks such ashigh-resolution photo editing without slowing down. Upgrading memory later is fiddly with a laptop.

The Satellite has a reasonably quick 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo T5450 processor, but it still won't suit you if you need really speedy performance. Everyday Windows tasks are capably handled, and more ambitious creative stuff is possible, but you won't be immune from some unresponsiveness and waiting around for complex operations to complete.

The integrated Intel graphics chip isn't powerful enough to attempt the latest 3D games, which is quite normal; we'd have been surprised to see a dedicated graphics chip in such a compact laptop.

We were more impressed with the quality of the Satellite's screen. The widescreen display was evenly lit and colours looked bright and rich. Areas of white were clean and vivid, with no colour cast. It isn't perfect - we detected some banding in our greyscale and colour gradient tests - but it's one of the best laptop screens we've seen, making it suitable for jobs like photo editing as well as great for movies. The glossy finish did reflect overhead lights quite a lot, which could be a pain in a brightly lit office.

Key to success

Despite its small size, we found the Satellite's keyboard a pleasure to type on, even for long periods. The keys were responsive, giving plenty of feedback when pressed. Not unusually for a laptop, some keys, such as the left shift key and the function keys, were too small for our fingers, and the touch pad was too small and felt annoyingly jittery, making our cursor control inaccurate. Its buttons were stiff and hard to press, too. A good touch pad is an important part of any laptop, especially an ultra-portable, unless you want to carry a mouse around and you have a big flat knee to roll it around on.

The U300 may be small, but it has useful extras built in, such as a memory card reader, a webcam, and an ExpressCard/54 slot that will accommodate peripherals such as a TV tuner. The case feels sturdy, but regular travellers should be aware that Toshiba's one-year warranty is only valid inside the UK, so you won't be able to get warranty service abroad.

We were impressed by the Satellite's classy appearance, good keyboard and quality screen. The poor touch pad and merely average battery

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life do detract, however, and performance is only average. If you need a laptop for regular mobile use, Samsung's Q45 is a better choice, with more RAM and hard disk space and a comfortable touch pad. Still, the Toshiba looks more interesting and costs £58 less, so it's worth considering. ALToshiba's Satellite U300-113 is a sleek ultra-portable laptop that weighs a little less than 2kg. It's eye-catching thanks to a classy silver-and-black case with a deep blue lid and the bright blue status lights that this year's Satellites are sporting. It looks expensive, but at £700 it's pretty reasonable, proving you don't have to pay a premium for a laptop light enough to carry around all the time.

The Satellite's slight frame does mean it won't strain your shoulders, but one side effect of this is its slightly disappointing battery life - no worse than many other budget laptops, but too short to set off for a day's travel without half an eye out for the next mains socket. It lasted barely two hours while playing a DVD, but did better in our light usage test, going for just over three hours, enough for a short-haul flight. We've seen ultra-portables last as long as five hours, including Samsung's Q45 (search for 122308), which weighs the same and costs only a little more. At least you won't have to wait around for the battery to recharge: it took only an hour and 14 minutes.

Short memory

We were surprised to see the Satellite arrive with only 1GB of RAM. While this is enough for everyday tasks, you'll want more to run several applications at once or tackle memory-intensive tasks such ashigh-resolution photo editing without slowing down. Upgrading memory later is fiddly with a laptop.

The Satellite has a reasonably quick 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo T5450 processor, but it still won't suit you if you need really speedy performance. Everyday Windows tasks are capably handled, and more ambitious creative stuff is possible, but you won't be immune from some unresponsiveness and waiting around for complex operations to complete.

The integrated Intel graphics chip isn't powerful enough to attempt the latest 3D games, which is quite normal; we'd have been surprised to see a dedicated graphics chip in such a compact laptop.

We were more impressed with the quality of the Satellite's screen. The widescreen display was evenly lit and colours looked bright and rich. Areas of white were clean and vivid, with no colour cast. It isn't perfect - we detected some banding in our greyscale and colour gradient tests - but it's one of the best laptop screens we've seen, making it suitable for jobs like photo editing as well as great for movies. The glossy finish did reflect overhead lights quite a lot, which could be a pain in a brightly lit office.

Key to success

Despite its small size, we found the Satellite's keyboard a pleasure to type on, even for long periods. The keys were responsive, giving plenty of feedback when pressed. Not unusually for a laptop, some keys, such as the left shift key and the function keys, were too small for our fingers, and the touch pad was too small and felt annoyingly jittery, making our cursor control inaccurate. Its buttons were stiff and hard to press, too. A good touch pad is an important part of any laptop, especially an ultra-portable, unless you want to carry a mouse around and you have a big flat knee to roll it around on.

The U300 may be small, but it has useful extras built in, such as a memory card reader, a webcam, and an ExpressCard/54 slot that will accommodate peripherals such as a TV tuner. The case feels sturdy, but regular travellers should be aware that Toshiba's one-year warranty is only valid inside the UK, so you won't be able to get warranty service abroad.

We were impressed by the Satellite's classy appearance, good keyboard and quality screen. The poor touch pad and merely average battery life do detract, however, and performance is only average. If you need a laptop for regular mobile use, Samsung's Q45 is a better choice, with more RAM and hard disk space and a comfortable touch pad. Still, the Toshiba looks more interesting and costs £58 less, so it's worth considering.