Product Reviews

Using a widescreen notebook may seem like an expensive luxury; not only do they generally cost more, but they're so heavy they hardly lend themselves to being carried around. Toshiba's M30, however, is an answer to this, being both well priced and light enough to be portable.

It also resembles Toshiba's P10 notebook, but lacks the P10's blue casing and its bulk. It's still rather portly, though, weighing in at 2.8kg, and given its 360mm width it will struggle to fit into most bags. Nevertheless, it's the thinnest widescreen we've seen and its silver plastic interior, rounded edges and Harman/Kardon speakers lend it some stylish superiority over the competition.

Despite its thickness, or lack thereof, the M30 still manages to cram in the ports and features you'd need and expect from such a notebook. First off, there's a DVD writer and, while this only supports the plus format, it's still a welcome inclusion. The drive is surrounded by three USB 2 ports on the right-hand side, where there's also a parallel port hidden under a hard plastic flap, as well as a four-pin FireWire port, slots for both SD and Type II PC Cards, and an S-Video port. The rear offers a D-SUB output, 10/100 Ethernet and 56K modem.

Toshiba has wisely chosen to place the headphones and mic sockets on the front right-hand corner for easy access. Also helping the audio side are five shortcut buttons for Windows Media Player and a volume control dial. Nestled next to these is an infrared port. Toshiba has also included an on/off switch for the 802.11b chip, which is a bit fiddly to use, as it's set into the chassis and so requires a fingernail flick to switch it on. However, on the plus side, this prevents it from being knocked into the on position by accident, and wasting precious battery life.

However, you may not find battery life too much of a problem, as the M30 lasted for well over

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an hour-and-a-half in our intensive test. Given the notebook's overall power and juice-sapping screen, this is pretty impressive and presumably down to the Centrino core. Our light-use test did disappoint, though, as the M30 only managed around three hours sitting idle with low-screen back lighting.

The rest of the performance results were excellent, though. Using a 1.6GHz Pentium-M processor and 512MB of DDR memory, it managed 1.28 in our 2D benchmarks. Granted, this isn't the best score we've seen from this chip, but it's still plenty for everyday office use, and the results breakdown shows that it lends itself particularly to word processing and database work.

Elsewhere, even the graphics are good, thanks to nVidia's GeForce FX Go5200 graphics chip. This 64MB version raced through 3DMark2001 SE, giving 6,735 at XGA and 32-bit colour depth, which is higher than we normally see from 5200 chips.

On the downside, the screen was quite a disappointment. While it may be wide - ideal for both spreadsheets and gaming - and offers a 1,200 x 800 resolution, reproducing text and playing DVDs with clarity, it's let down by being rather dull. Even at the highest setting, the M30's screen was quite embarrassingly dark - unplug it and things became much worse. As such, we can't recommend it for watching films or gaming. If you intend to use it in the office, be sure you have an external monitor to plug it into or it could become unbearable.

Also, the lack of PS/2 ports means you'll either have to invest in a USB keyboard and mouse, or use those supplied. To be fair, though, neither are particularly awful to use: the touchpad may be a little small and the buttons took a little getting used to, but it is responsive. The keyboard makes good use of the notebook's size, and the keys have a delicate spring to them, but Toshiba's keyboard layout is frustrating. Those fond of keyboard shortcuts will find the awkward placement of the Windows key and missing right-hand Ctrl key irritating. Also, with the Insert key taking up a large area, the spacebar is rather on the short side, which meant we found ourselves often tapping it accidentally and replacing much of our own text.

Despite these complaints, this is a very good notebook at a fair price. Its dark screen prevents it from being an ideal low-cost mobile gaming machine, but office users - especially those with wireless networks - will find the power, wide screen and decent battery life invaluable.