Product Reviews

Undergoing its third facelift in less than a year, the 100CT represents the most dramatic update yet to Toshiba's featherweight Libretto notebook. The original Libretto 50CT appeared in issue 36 of PC Pro, only to be followed three months later by the 70CT (previewed issue 40, p158), which featured an improvement in processor speed, slightly longer battery life and a bigger hard disk.

Now, a mere nine months after we were first wooed by the smallest Windows 95 machine ever, the Libretto has changed yet again, and it's actually got bigger - by 17mm to be precise. This may not sound like much, but it does make the 100CT a full 15 per cent deeper so that it no longer has the potential to fit in a large jacket pocket.

The chief culprit behind this growth is a new wide-aspect 7.1in TFT screen with an unusual resolution of 800 x 480. That's not to say that this isn't a welcome improvement - the larger screen makes the Libretto a lot more comfortable to work on; there's more workspace, and text is far easier to read without increasing the font size. It just strikes me that the screen was the very last thing that needed any improvement.

Despite the larger form factor, the keyboard remains the same. I did get used to it after a while, but the tiny keytops will present a problem for those who don't have the benefit of slender fingers or long nails. The keyboard offered far greater potential for development, and given the choice between a better screen or a better keyboard, I'd plump for the latter every time.

The performance of the original 50CT was crippled by a lack of secondary-level cache, and this still hasn't been remedied. And while the screen may be brighter and sharper than that of Mitsubishi's Amity CN (previewed issue 42, p155), it also draws more power. Again, given the sort of on-the-move environment the Libretto has presumably been designed

Inevitably, the 100CT also sports a faster processor and more memory, although the hard disk is the same size as before. This time your £1,495 gets you a Pentium/166 MMX processor, 32Mb of 60ns EDO RAM, 2Gb of hard disk space, a Yamaha OPL3-Sax audio chipset and a 2Mb NeoMagic MagicGraph 128XD graphics chipset that will run 32-bit colour in the screen's native resolution or 16-bit colour in 1,024 x 768 expanded desktop mode. Yet Toshiba has still managed to allow for either a pair of Type II PC Card slots or one Type III and an infrared transceiver to be squeezed into the right-hand side of the machine. It's still astonishing to see just how much can be crammed into a box that's the size of your average hardback crime thriller.

However, a box this size will never be able to accommodate the mechanics of a floppy disk drive or the type of connections supplied with most standard notebooks, but there's provision for these to be connected separately. The floppy disk hooks up to one of the PC Card slots, while a small port replicator unit can be clipped onto the rear to give the Libretto serial, parallel and VGA ports.

The main lithium ion battery clips in under what could loosely be called the palmrest. While this is a slightly larger module than before, it doesn't appear to offer anything more in the way of extra battery life. With the power management features set to minimum, I managed just over an hour and a half of word processing, which is very poor considering that this demands minimal hard disk activity. Most notebooks can offer more than this, and although Toshiba's excellent power save utility will increase the battery life, it's simply not good enough.

Performance is nothing to write home about either. With a particularly slow Access score, the Libretto 100CT's overall benchmark of 0.62 was considerably slower than that of our desktop 166MHz MMX reference. I very much doubt that the Libretto will be used for Photoshop or DTP work, but the 32Mb of RAM and 166MHz MMX processor will run two major Office applications such as Word and Excel side by side without breaking a sweat.

There's no denying that the Libretto 100CT is absolutely gorgeous to look at, a pose to own and a marvellous demonstration of what modern technology can do. However, until improvements are made to the keyboard and battery life, its practical applications remain limited.