Toshiba Encore 2 review: This Windows 8 tablet goes easy on your wallet

Toshiba Encore 2 Toshiba made a number of compromises to hit this low price point, but the Encore 2 runs Windows 8.1 and Office 365 well enough for us to recommend it.

Microsoft sparked a race to the bottom with the introduction of Windows 8.1 with Bing. And Toshiba cut the bottom out of the bottom line with its Encore 2 series, bringing Windows tablets down to the price of mainstream Android tablets. The 10-inch version reviewed here will set you back just $270, and the smaller 8-inch version costs just $200.

What compromises must you put up with at prices that low? Surprisingly few. While the Encore 2’s build quality isn’t the best, the tablet is sturdy enough that I wouldn't worry about sliding it into a bag and carrying it around all day. The tablet feels plasticky, but it’s also light at just 1.2 pounds. And since that weight is in a slab that's only 0.375 inches thick, it feels solid. I was able to hold it comfortably in one hand for extended periods, and that’s something I can’t usually say about 10-inch tablets.

I prefer the real button to the touch-sensitive version on the previous Encore.

The white bezel and champagne back help the Encore 2 stand out in a market full of black and silver. Its IPS panel delivers run-of-the-mill resolution of 1280x800 pixels, but it boasts good viewing angles. It gets dim enough to be comfortable in dark environments, but you'll want to crank it all the way up to work in a well-lit room.

Michael Homnick

Most of the Toshiba Encore 2's ports are located on its right-hand side: You can use its MicroSD card slot to add up to 128GB of storage. 

I did encounter some intermittent responsiveness issues with the touchscreen, though. A firmware update improved the situation, but it never entirely disappeared and I was never able to isolate the cause. A quick reboot generally smoothed things out when it became too annoying.

The Encore 2's battery life is respectable for a 10-inch tablet. 

There’s a small Toshiba logo on the tablet’s front bezel, but the capacitive Start button on the previous-generation Encore has been replaced by a physical button on the top edge. You’ll also find a volume rocker and a power button here. I actually prefer the real button to the touch-sensitive version, as I was less likely to activate it by mistake.

Stereo speakers on each side work well for videos and music playback in a quiet room, and there’s a headset jack for private listening and video calls. A microSD slot lets you expand the Encore 2’s measly 32GB of storage, and you’ll find micro HDMI, and micro USB ports on the same edge. Wireless connectivity includes 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0.

Michael Homnick

Toshiba moved the Encore 2's Start button to its top edge, alongside a volume rocker and power switch. 

The Encore 2 is powered by Intel’s quad-core Atom Z3735G (a Bay Trail-class processor), but having just 1GB of memory—not upgradable—leaves me a just a wee bit nervous. When’s the last time you ran Windows on anything with that little RAM? Having said that, this tablet runs Office 365 without a problem (Toshiba includes a one-year subscription with the purchase price).

In fact, the performance hit as a whole isn’t as significant as I had expected. The Encore 2 turned in lower benchmark scores than other Windows tablets we've tested, but they weren’t drastically lower. While its PCMark 8: Office score was 22 percent lower than that of the $430 Dell Venue Pro 11, it was just 14 percent lower than the $569 Lenovo ThinkPad 10's.

Yes, the Toshiba Encore 2 trails the field in terms of its Laptop WorldBench 9 performance. But it's also the least-expensive 10.1-inch Windows tablet we've tested.

In fact, I used the Encore 2 and a Bluetooth keyboard to write this entire review in OneNote without encountering any significant slowdowns. I also used it as I would every other tablet I’ve reviewed: I read and wrote email, surfed the web using multiple tabs, streamed Netflix movies, and noodled around small-footprint modern UI apps. The only difference I noticed is that apps clear out of memory more quickly. That just means apps must refresh if they fall more than four or five places down the queue in the sidebar app switcher.

The Encore 2's performance won't set the world afire, but it's strong enough for light productivity tasks. 

Full-featured Windows tablets, such as the aforementioned Dell and Lenovo models, can replace a notebook (provided you add peripherals such as a Bluetooth keyboard). I can’t envision Toshiba’s Encore 2 that way—it’s more of a companion device for very light productivity and entertainment.

But for the price, that might be enough.

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Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook review: It hits a sweet spot

Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook $279.00 The Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook is one of the few Chromebooks worth recommending. It hits a sweet spot with its good-sized display, long battery life, and compact design.

The Chromebook has found its sweet spot, and it's around the $279 range where the Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook resides. It sure isn't down in the dumps with the $200-or-so cheapies, with their clackety plastics and sorry little screens. Nor is it in the 1-percenter fantasyland of the gorgeous and expensive Chromebook Pixel. The $250 Samsung Chromebook 3 is nice, and if you jumped to $300 you could get an 11-inch  touchscreen in the Acer C270P, or a 14-inch (non-touch) display in the HP Chromebook 14. But for $279, the Toshiba CB35-A3120 is nearly as good as those higher-priced competitors. It's also a notch better than the like-priced HP Chromebook 11, despite the latter’s many charms (and much simpler name).

Image: Michael Homnick

A top-down view shows the roomy clickpad and island-style keyboard.

What the Toshiba CB35-A3120 has over the HP Chromebook 11 are a much larger, 13.3-inch LED backlit display, a mobile-friendly Intel Celeron 2955U (Haswell) processor, and a 52Wh, 4-Cell Li-Ion battery. Performance is good, scoring 2910 in Peacekeeper. The battery lasted almost 7 hours in our tests—nearly identical to the HP Chromebook 14’s result (also sporting Haswell, plus a 51Wh, 4-cell battery), and noticeably longer than what the HP Chromebook 11 achieved with its ARM processor and 30Wh battery.

Image: Michael Homnick

The right side has an audio jack, two USB 3.0 ports, and an HDMI-out port.

The CB35-A3120 also trumps the Chromebook 11 in connectivity, sporting two USB 3.0 ports (the HP has just USB 2.0) as well as an SD card slot, headphone jack, and HDMI-out port. Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 are built-in, and a webcam and microphone sit atop the display. Built-in stereo speakers deliver tolerably tinny sound.

Image: Michael Homnick

The left side has an SD card slot along with AC and lock ports.

I always feel cramped on the 11-inch displays of most low-end Chromebooks. The wide, 16:9 aspect ratio of the CB35-A3120’s display keeps the device compact (8.9 by 12.9 by 0.80 inches), unlike the decidedly bulkier HP Chromebook 14. The 1366-by-768-pixel resolution is nothing special, nor is the occasionally choppy-blocky video playback (it supports 720p), but this is typical for the price range, unfortunately.

Image: Michael Homnick

The dotty-textured surface is more interesting than smooth plastic and easy to grip as well.

At this price you also get a “Sunray Silver” plastic chassis whose dotty-textured surface is both attractive and easy to grip. I dislike the slight bendiness to the display lid, but the bottom half is nicely stiff. The 3.3-pound weight is very easy to tote.

Image: Michael Homnick

The CB35-A3120 is slender, small, and light enough to carry easily.

Most low-end Chromebooks have crummy keyboards: hard plastic, hard travel. The CB35-A3120’s island-style keys are hard, but the softer travel was a pleasant surprise—heavy typists will appreciate the difference. The top-row function keys and lower-right cursor keys are half-sized, but usable. The clickpad is roomy and pretty responsive.

Image: Michael Homnick

The half-size cursor and function keys are still usable.

The Chromebook’s other features include 2GB of DDR3L 1600MHz memory and a 16GB SSD. You get 100GB free on Google Drive but for only 2 years, so prepare for the end.

Chromebooks are hitting their stride. With the Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook, there’s now a handful of models I’m actually willing to recommend. My current attainable favorite (that is, not the Chromebook Pixel) is the HP Chromebook 14. But for greater portability, competitive attributes, and slightly less cash, the CB35-A3120 is a tempting alternative.

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Review: The Toshiba Q Series Pro SSD delivers top performance at a discount

Many capable SSDs are out there, but don't overlook a relative newcomer: Toshiba's Q Series Pro. Toshiba's drives are among the very fastest we've tested, and in an unusual development, we saw no drop in performance in its smaller capacities. Throw in heavy online discounts, and you have an excellent bargain in a top-performing drive.

The Q Series Pro drives are only 7mm thick, so they'll fit in just about any laptop that supports a 2.5-inch drive. The controller is Toshiba's own TC358790XBG, as is the 19nm Toggle-mode MLC NAND. In our tests reading and writing a single 10GB file (using a 16GB RAM drive on our test bed), each of the three capacities Toshiba sent us—128GB, 256GB, and 512GB—proved excellent performers.

Toshiba's drive delivered very high performance when reading and writing a single 10GB file (click to enlarge).

Until now, the rule as been that the smaller the capacity, the slower the drive (because of fewer chips and fewer channels), but the Q Series blew that up and then some. The 128GB drive actually ended up being the fastest capacity we tested, although the difference was so small as to be statistically irrelevant. 

The 128GB Q Series Pro wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 409.9 MBps and read it at 412.25 MBps. With a single large 10GB file, that jumped to 635.4 MBps writing and 481.4 MBps reading. No single result was fast enough for first place, but where many drives shine at either reading or writing, the Q Series Pro is top-notch at both. 

Toshiba's Q Pro Series SSD also delivered excellent performance when reading and writing 20GB of folders and small files.

As mentioned, the larger capacities were slower, but only by very slight margins. Overall, the 128GB finished third among all the unaided drives (no software on the PC) that we've tested of any capacity, and it finished far ahead of other 128GB drives we've tested.

The 256GB and 512GB drives placed fifth and sixth respectively; you should note, however, that first and sixth place are separated in performance by just 3 percent. 

The Toshiba Q Series Pro drives carry some rather hefty suggested retail pricing: $160 for the 128GB, $310 for the 256GB, and a sky-high $740 for the 512GB model. But a quick trip online revealed stunning discounts that drop the price below 80 cents per gigabyte. That's a bargain in a drive this fast. The only downside is that the Q Series Pro is warrantied for just three years, while its Samsung 840 Pro and OCZ Vector competitors carry five-year warranties.

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Toshiba Tecra Z40-A1401 review: Too little for too much

Business computers usually cost more than consumer machines. But if you’re a small-business owner, you need to determine if the features in a laptop designed for the enterprise are worth the added cost. That question is particularly pertinent when comparing Toshiba’s Tecra Z40 to considerably cheaper consumer-oriented laptops from the likes of Dell and Lenovo.

What features might you see in a business laptop that you won’t find in a consumer machine? You first need to look at the processor. The Tecra Z40, the Dell Inspiron 14, and the Lenovo Flex 14 are all powered by Intel Core i5 processors, but the CPU in the Toshiba is a Core i5-4300U while the Dell and the Lenovo pack the Core i5-4200U. What’s the big diff?

Toshiba's pick delivers Intel’s vPro technology. A CPU with vPro includes a set of security and manageability features that make the computer easier for an IT department to manage. It also includes capabilities designed to protect the computer from rootkits, viruses, and malware, as well as remote and local monitoring and repair of the PC.

ROBERT CARDIN

The Toshiba Tecra Z40-A1404 has plenty of I/O ports, but DisplayPort isn't one of them.

The Core i5-4300U is also outfitted with Intel’s Small Business Advantage (software monitoring, backup and restore, USB port blocker, and a few other features), Intel Smart Response Technology (a feature that leverages the use of a small SSD with a higher-capacity mechanical hard drive), and Intel Stable Image Platform (a program that ensures that the PC platform you deploy will remain standardized for at least 15 months).

Business-oriented laptops also tend to be lighter in weight. At 3.24 pounds, the Tecra Z40 is more than a full pound lighter than either the Dell Inspiron 14 or the Lenovo Flex 14 (both of which tip the scales at 4.4 pounds). If you’re on the road a lot, you’ll feel that extra pound on the Dell or the Lenovo every step of the way.

Finally, business laptops typically have an optional docking station or port replicator that enables rapid switching between desktop and mobile modes. Toshiba offers a $200 port replicator for the Tecra Z40 that adds four USB 3.0 ports, as well as HDMI, DVI-D (or VGA, with an adapter), and DisplayPort 1.2 with multistreaming (a particularly valuable addition, since, unlike most business laptops, the Tecra Z40 doesn’t support DisplayPort on its own). You can buy third-party docking stations for almost any laptop that uses technology such as USB and DisplayLink, but they’re not always as elegant.

The eval unit Toshiba sent came with Windows 7 Professional, but a Windows 8 Pro license is also included, in case you’d like to switch. I’m actually a fan of Windows 8, but the Z40 lacks the touchscreen needed to take full advantage of that newer OS.

The Tecra Z40 relies on the Intel HD Graphics 4400 integrated into its CPU to drive its 14-inch display, which has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. The display feels a little dim even at the brightest settings, and while the viewing angles aren’t bad, colors start to look a little washed out if you aren’t staring dead on—stick to projectors if you want to show off that presentation.

ROBERT CARDIN

The Tecra Z40’s 1366-by-768 display is disappointingly dim.

The integrated GPU shares some of the machine’s 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory with the CPU. Considering the Tecra Z40’s price tag, I was surprised to find that it arrived with just a 320GB mechanical hard drive and not a zippy SSD. The drive does spin its platters at 7200 rpm, but $1229 is a lot of lettuce for a business laptop that doesn’t include an SSD. On the upside, Toshiba included Intel’s Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 network adapter, so you can take advantage of the speed of the 802.11ac router in your office (it’s a 2x2 device, so its physical link rate will top out at 867 megabits per second).

The keys on the Tecra Z40’s backlit keyboard are comfortably sized, albeit a bit cramped. Its top row of function keys default to that purpose, so you’ll need to hold down a second key to adjust volume or screen brightness, or to control any media-player software. There’s an old-school pointing nub in the center—the kind of nub that was de rigeur on “serious” laptops back before Apple showed us trackpads didn’t have to be uniformly terrible. It’s smaller than the red pointing nub you’ll find on Lenovo’s business laptops and a bit more prone to picking up lint, but it’s plenty accurate and comfortable to use.

The Tecra Z40’s trackpad is an odd beast. The left and right mouse buttons sit above it, as if to suggest that the pointing nub should be your primary means of mousing. A solid silver bar below the pad harbors a fingerprint reader, but my brain sees the contrast between the silver bar and the dark gray trackpad and assumes “button,” which inevitably results in a thumb repeatedly mashed against an unforgiving slab of metal. No, you’ll want to click the left and right corners of the trackpad. The fingerprint utility can store up to 20 fingerprints, and it recommends that users store at least two “in case of a finger injury,” which is amusing in a morbid sort of way.

ROBERT CARDIN

Fabricated largely from magnesium, the Tecra Z40 weighs 3.24 pounds.

Toshiba’s machine has three USB 3.0 ports (one of which can be used to charge a smartphone or other device, even when the laptop is sleeping), an SD card reader, and a full-sized ethernet jack (oriented upside down, so you can press down on the retainer clip with your thumb). Video outputs include HDMI and VGA (useful mostly for connecting to old video projectors), but it lacks DisplayPort—a common feature on business-oriented laptops.

If you intend to listen to music while you work, you’ll want to rely on the Tecra Z40’s combination headphone/microphone jack. The anemic pair of speakers located on its front edge sound sadly tinny and are nearly devoid of bass response. They’re also not very loud, which will be a problem when you need to share a video with colleagues in a crowded conference room.

The Tecra Z40 is a decidedly average performer, producing a WorldBench 8.1 score of 156. That’s a little higher than Dell’s $650 Inspiron 14, which scored 132, but far behind the $750 Lenovo Flex 14’s WorldBench score of 278. The PCMark 7 productivity suite and storage test results were the biggest factors here: The Dell scored just 982 on the productivity suite, versus the Lenovo’s 2662 and the Toshiba’s 1703. The Dell and the Toshiba also lagged on the storage test, scoring 1479 and 1626 respectively, compared with the Lenovo’s 5103.

The presence of an SSD in Lenovo’s Flex 14 boosted its WorldBench score high above that of the hard-drive-powered Dell Inspiron 14 and the Toshiba Tecra Z40. The Toshiba, on the other hand, is outfitted with a business-oriented Intel Core i5-4300U. (Click chart to enlarge.)

Why such a disparity when all three machines have roughly the same CPU? The Lenovo Flex 14 is outfitted with a 120GB SSD. The Dell has a mechanical hard drive that spins at 5400 rpm, and the Toshiba has a 7200-rpm mechanical drive. The Inspiron 14 also came with 6GB of memory, versus 8GB for the other two machines; nonetheless, the scores on the balance of the benchmarks that factor into the WorldBench score were all much closer.

The Haswell-class CPUs in all three machines contributed to great battery life. Here again, the Lenovo Flex 14’s SSD helped it win this round. (Click to enlarge.)

Since all three machines feature a Haswell-class CPU, battery life was excellent across the board: at or above 7 hours. The Flex 14, however, lasted a full 26 minutes longer than the Tecra Z40.Toshiba provides a bevy of its own utilities for managing your power consumption, among other things, which some buyers will find useful. For example, the HDD Protection utility automatically moves your hard drive’s head to a “safe position” to prevent damage when the laptop detects vibration. But at the risk of beating a dead horse, that utility wouldn’t be necessary if Toshiba provided an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive.

If you need a business laptop with a business-oriented CPU, you’ll find better values in the marketplace than the Tecra Z40 at $1229. And if you can get by with a consumer-oriented laptop, you’ll find some great machines for hundreds less.

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Toshiba Qosmio X75 A7298 review: A desktop replacement that won’t break the bank—or your back

Toshiba Qosmio X75 A7298 $1,900.00 Toshiba's Qosmio X75 is loaded with high-end components and delivers impeccable performance. If you need a desktop-replacement laptop, this is definitely one to consider.

Most manufacturers throw weight considerations out the window when they set about designing a desktop-replacement notebook. Not Toshiba’s engineers. Despite packing a 256GB solid-state drive plus a 1TB hybrid hard drive, a Blu-ray burner (not just a player), Nvidia’s second-fastest mobile GPU, and a 17.3-inch high-res display, the Qosmio X75 A7298 weighs a modest 7.3 pounds.

It might sound odd to classify 7.3 pounds as modest. After all, the Qosmio X75 won’t even fit in some laptop bags. But considering that this laptop can play games, create and edit digital media, and handle pretty much any other task you’d normally rely on a desktop computer to perform, a 7.3-pound weight is pretty remarkable. After all, how easy would it be to lug a desktop PC, a 17-inch monitor, and an uninterruptible power supply from location to location?

Robert CardinToshiba packs desktop performance into a highly mobile machine. (Click to enlarge.)

Intel’s Core i7-4700MQ, a quad-core mobile CPU, forms the Qosmio X75's heart. It’s paired with 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 770M mobile graphics processor (which has 3GB of GDDR5 memory all its own). A dedicated GPU is great for playing hard-core games, but it will speed other tasks too.

Demanding applications such as Photoshop, for instance, will tap the hundreds of microprocessor cores inside the GTX 770M chip to accelerate image processing. In the GPU-accelerated image-processing segment of our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite, the Qosmio X75 required just over 60 seconds to complete a task that Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch—which relies on integrated graphics—took more than 5 minutes to finish.

Toshiba’s Qosmio X75 A7298 delivered a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 430, one of the best performances we've seen to date. (Click to enlarge.)

The display is bright and beautiful, but it isn’t a touchscreen (as is common with gaming laptops). Since I’ve grown accustomed to using touchscreens with Windows 8, I couldn’t stop myself from swiping my finger across the panel, which has a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, to bring up the charm bar. I’m sure I would eventually adapt to using the large touchpad for that. Lucky owners of a 4K television can output 4K video from this computer’s HDMI port. The HDMI 1.4 port is limited to a refresh rate of 24Hz, but that’s fine for movies—no one in their right mind would try gaming at 4K.

The chassis is wrapped in textured aluminum, painted flat black to give it the look of carbon fiber. An attractive (or garish—you be the judge) accent stripe, bright red and highly reflective, runs around the laptop’s edge.

You can play a blazing-fast game of BioShock Infinite at low resolution on the Qosmio X75. Crank the game up to 1920 by 1080 pixels with visual quality at the Ultra setting, and you'll still get nearly 30 frames per second. (Click to enlarge.)

The island-style keyboard is backlit with red LEDs to match the machine’s color scheme. The keys aren’t sculpted, but they offer long travel, so you don’t need to worry about unintentionally depressing them while your fingers are resting on the keyboard. When you’re playing a stealth game such as a Splinter Cell title, there’s nothing more frustrating than accidentally giving away your position because your hand grew heavy over the WASD keys (which Toshiba has helpfully labeled with arrow symbols).

The size of the display allows Toshiba to provide adequate space between the keys and to include an embedded numeric keypad, but it’s unfortunate that the arrow keys beneath the Enter key (and the function keys at the very top) are half-size.

Because the wrist rest sitting beneath the keyboard is especially wide at 4.5 inches, Toshiba was able to place a large (4.5 inches wide by 3.1 inches tall) and very responsive multitouch touchpad in this area. A large speaker grille resides above the keyboard, directly under the display. The Qosmio X75’s audio system, designed with the assistance of DTS and Harman/Kardon, is excellent: The speakers deliver crisp highs and deep, well-defined bass response.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Qosmio X75 deliver 2 hours, 22 minutes of battery life. That's impressive for a notebook that offers so much performance. (Click to enlarge.)

The Qosmio X75 has plenty of real estate to hold ports, and Toshiba took full advantage, placing two USB 3.0 ports and a gigabit ethernet port next to the Blu-ray burner on the left side. Two more USB 3.0 ports, separate mic and headphone jacks, VGA, and HDMI-out occupy the right side, and a multiformat media-card reader sits in front. I was disappointed, however, to see Toshiba give short shrift to wireless networking: A $1900 laptop deserves better than a single-band (2.4GHz) 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter.

I was surprised at how quietly the Qosmio X75 ran, considering all the high-performance hardware stuffed inside it. Less surprising is the brief battery life, though 2 hours, 22 minutes is still more than enough time to watch a full-length movie (not that this behemoth would fit on an airline tray table). This computer can do it all and anywhere, so it's a great choice for a desktop replacement.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of the 5 best Haswell notebooks as of September 2013.

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Toshiba PX35t review: This budget all-in-one is quick, stylish and a great choice for the student

Toshiba PX35t-A2210 $930.00 The Toshiba PX35t-A2210 is a relatively powerful all-in-one desktop machine. While it is more expensive than the rest of this field, it delivers the performance and features to back up its price tag.

If looks are your top priority, Toshiba’s PX35t-A2210 ($930 as of 8/30/13) will surely woo you with its slim, attractive design. This 23-inch AIO sports a glossy full HD touchscreen, modern-looking wireless peripherals, and a third-generation Intel Core i3-3120M processor. It also boasts 6GB of DDR3/1600 RAM, built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and a roomy 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive.

There's plenty to like about Toshiba's PX35t-A2210, but its sharply angular mouse isn't one of them.

But looks aren’t everything, and the PX35t-A2210 isn’t just a pretty centerpiece for your desk, it’s also a good all-around performer, delivering a Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score of 131. That means it’s nearly one-third faster than our baseline machine, the Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13 . You won’t mistake the PX35t-A2210 for a top-of-the-line gaming machine, but it’ll do just fine managing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; surfing the Web and checking email; and streaming HD clips from Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

The PX35t-A2210 relies on the Intel HD 4000 Graphics processor integrated into its CPU, rather than a discrete graphics card, but it can still handle many graphics-related tasks without falling over and dying. It outperformed the rest of the field with our BioShock Infinite benchmark, for instance, delivering the game at 26.6 frames per second (albeit with resolution of just 1024 by 768 pixels and image quality at Low). It took a first-place finish with Dirt Showdown, too, delivering the game at 47 frames per second (here again, with resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels and image quality set to low). This PC won’t have any problem with less visually intense games, such as MMORPGs. Simpler photo- and video-editing tasks won’t be an issue, either.

The Desktop Worldbench 8.1 chart is repeated here, so you don't have to have to go back to the previous page to see an overall performance snapshot.

Toshiba outfitted the PX35t-A2210 with a glossy 23-inch multitouch screen with native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. It’s a very good display, but it’s not perfect. While it’s extremely bright, and images look crisp and clear on it, colors look a little dull and whites have a yellowish tint. It’s also not the most accurate touchscreen I’ve used. There were several moments in my testing when I accidentally hit the link below the one I was trying to tap. Multitouch gestures are smooth and seamless, but the glass has an ever-so-slightly tacky feeling to it, which can make gliding across its surface a little tough. But it’s a much better input device than the PX35t-A2210’s mouse, which is a modern-looking angular thing that felt uncomfortable and sharp in my hand. The keyboard, meanwhile, delivers shallow tactile feedback but accurate typing.

The Toshiba PX35t-A2210 is attractive, usable, and relatively powerful. It’s a great choice for college students looking to balance work and play, since it performs basic administrative tasks with ease and can also play streaming HD video without a hitch. It has excellent Harman/Kardon speakers (with a Sleep and Music feature that lets you play your digital media player through them), and an ample collection of other I/O ports: Four USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, and one HDMI input (so you can plug in a cable/satellite set-top box or a videogame console).

Editor's note: This all-in-one was reviewed as part of a roundup for back-to-school season. You can read that story, along with reviews of the five all-in-ones we compared it to, here.

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Toshiba Satellite L55Dt-A5253 review: This 15.6-inch budget laptop does well on benchmarks but has some physical drawbacks

The buyers that Toshiba targets with its luxury Kirabook wouldn’t touch a Satellite L55Dt-A5253 if Neiman Marcus was giving them away. That’s too bad, because this laptop actually offers a much better price-to-performance ratio.

Toshiba selected AMD’s 2.0GHz A6-5200 APU to power this $650 notebook. That chip features an integrated AMD Radeon HD 8400 graphics processor, which helped Toshiba secure a second-place finish in the games portion of our benchmark suite. But the machine’s 6GB of DDR3 memory runs at only 1333MHz, which held its performance back in comparison to some of the laptops equipped with Intel CPUs and faster DDR3/1600 memory.

ToshibaToshiba's Satellite L55Dt-A5253 uses AMD’s A6-5200 processor, which has an integrated Radeon HD 8400 graphics processor.

Like most notebooks in its price range, the Satellite is composed primarily of plastic, but Toshiba’s attractive material does a nice job of resisting smudges and fingerprints. The computer’s lid and chassis also feel more rigid than most, though it does weigh a full pound more than the Acer Aspire E1—a significant consideration if you’ll be carrying your laptop on your shoulder for extended periods every day.

The Satellite L55Dt features a 15.6-inch, LED-backlit touchscreen display with a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. The display is attractive enough, if you position it just so. Text appears most legibly when the screen is tilted back; but bring it even slightly forward—as you might have to do when using the computer on your airline tray table, if the passenger in front of you decides to recline—and you may not be able to read it at all.

ToshibaThe Toshiba Satellite is one of the more attractive notebooks on the market.

If your arms get tired from reaching out to stroke the Satellite’s screen, you can use its touchpad, instead. The touchpad is centered beneath the keyboard, so it’s off center from wrist rest, but that’s where it should be. It supports all of the usual Windows 8 gestures, including two-finger scrolling, zoom, rotate, and flip. And you can slide in from the right border to call up the charm bar, or slide it from the left to switch between applications. The setup lacks distinct left and right mouse buttons, but you can click the lower area of the pad to obtain the same actions.

Weight is an all-important consideration when you're shopping for a laptop.

Toshiba took advantage of the display’s width to provide a numeric keypad next to the alphanumeric keyboard. The half-size function keys in the top row have useful default actions mapped to them—including controls for such features as volume, brightness, and a media player.

The island-style keyboard has short-travel keys that nevertheless provide a desirable amount of tactile feedback while remaining nearly silent. I wouldn’t have minded the half-size arrow keys if they hadn’t been located so close to the edge of the wrist rest. The entire keyboard is recessed in a well, making it nearly impossible to tell whether your finger is tapping the up arrow or the down arrow without taking your eyes off the screen to look.

Benchmark performance

The Satellite L55Dt-A5253 finished third in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark suite, a scant 2 points behind Lenovo’s Intel Core i5–powered IdeaPad Z400 Touch, but 16 points behind the Intel Haswell–powered Acer Aspire E1-572-6870. The Toshiba’s 750GB, 5400-rpm hard drive helped it grab a second-place finish in the PCMark7 Productivity component, but the faster CPU in the Acer Aspire more than compensated for that computer’s smaller drive.

Our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite includes a broad array of benchmarks for evaluating a notebook's performance.

Given the amount of hay AMD has made over what it describes as its superior GPU/CPU integration, I had expected to see this A6-powered notebook clean up on the gaming benchmarks. It did reasonably well, but fell 5 fps short of equaling the performance of the Intel-powered Acer Aspire E1.

Connectivity and conclusion

Toshiba provides the usual three USB ports on its Satellite: Two of these are USB 3.0 and you can use the one USB 2.0 port to charge your smartphone (or other USB device) even while the computer is sleeping—a very handy feature. The media card reader in the front of the PC supports only SD media.

Aan HDMI-out supports digital display connections, and VGA handles analog. I don’t want to see HDMI go away, but I’d like to see laptop manufacturers include DisplayPort 1.2 ports on their consumer offerings. A DisplayPort 1.2 connection would let you daisy-chain displays, and you could buy an adapter to handle just about anything else, including VGA.

Like the Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch, the Toshiba Satellite L55Dt-A5253 provides a single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter that limits you to accessing overcrowded 2.4GHz networks; worse, the Toshiba’s Realtek RTL8188SU supports a maximum physical link rate of just 150 mbps, whereas the Lenovo’s Intel adapter delivers a 300-mbps maximum link rate and support for Intel’s WiDi media-streaming technology.

Though the Satellite bears a DTS Sound logo, I found its audio capabilities wanting. Music sounded thin and flat, with very little of the oomph I crave from bass response. Stick with headphones, and you should be fine. Finally, this may reflect my right-handed bias, but I found it odd to access the Satellite’s DVD burner on the left side of the computer. The hardwired ethernet port—100 mbps max—is located here, too.

The Satellite L55Dt-A5253 is a well-built laptop that delivers good performance, but many of its drawbacks don’t show up in its benchmark numbers: It’s weighs 5.6 pounds, its off-axis viewing is abysmal, and it has third-rate wireless networking capabilities. Clearly, it’s not the best notebook in this collection, but it’s still a decent value.

Editor's note: This notebook was reviewed as part of a roundup for back-to-school season. You can read that story, along with reviews of the five notebooks we compared it to, here

Michael manages PCWorld's hardware product reviews and contributes to TechHive's coverage of home-control systems and sound bars.
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Toshiba Kirabook review: The first Ultrabook with a higher-than-HD touchscreen

Toshiba Kirabook i7 Touchscreen $1,999.99(Lowest Price) The Kirabook looks the part of a luxury laptop, and it’s the first Ultrabook to compete with Apple’s Retina lineup. But Toshiba made some disappointing decisions on the way to a $2000 price tag.

Toshiba's luxurious Kirabook is the first Windows laptop to feature a display rivaling Apple’s Retina technology. The Kirabook is also thinner and much lighter than Apple’s MacBook Pro, and it’s outfitted with a touchscreen. While I wish I could report that Toshiba has crafted a masterpiece that fully justifies its $2000 price tag, this machine suffers from a couple of significant flaws.

With a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, the Kirabook’s 13.3-inch display delivers a pixel density of 221 pixels per inch—just shy of the 227 ppi that Apple packs into the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s 2560-by-1600-pixel display. If you think Apple’s computers are overpriced, consider the fact that a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 3.0GHz Intel Core i7-3540M processor sells for $100 less than the Kirabook, which runs on a 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U CPU. Apple, however, doesn't currently offer any full-blown computers with touchscreens (the iPad doesn't count).

Like many touchscreens we've seen, the Kirabook's is highly reflective.

Clock speeds aren’t everything, of course. The processor that Toshiba picked boasts a TDP (thermal design power) of just 17 watts, versus the 35-watt TDP of the chip that Apple uses. (Thermal design power refers to the maximum amount of power that a computer’s cooling system must dissipate. A lower TDP is desirable for a mobile computer, because it improves battery life. In our test, the Kirabook’s battery lasted an impressive 5 hours, 14 minutes.) The Kirabook’s other key components include 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. I’ll get into the Kirabook’s performance in depth later.

Toshiba is rightfully proud of the rigidity of the Kirabook's magnesium-alloy chassis, but…

Photos, movies, and documents look gorgeous on the Kirabook’s display. But when I compared the Kirabook to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (Apple doesn’t offer its high-res display on its thinner, lighter MacBook Air line), I found that Apple’s product delivered far better contrast. Both machines rely on the Intel HD 4000 GPU core integrated into the CPU, so I don’t know whether the Kirabook’s problem is due to Toshiba’s choice of Corning Concore glass (which is specifically formulated for touchscreens) or due to the fingerprint-resistant coating on the glass. Whatever the reason, it was no contest: The Retina display produced much deeper blacks.

The Kirabook (top) weighs 2.97 pounds and measures 0.7 inch thick. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (bottom) weighs 3.57 pounds and measures 0.75 inch thick.

Toshiba’s touchscreen is very responsive, and since it supports ten touch points it accepts all Windows 8 gestures. But Toshiba made a serious mistake by outfitting the Kirabook with only an HDMI video output. If you connect the notebook to a big-screen monitor, the maximum resolution you’ll get is 1920 by 1080 pixels. Had the laptop’s designers specified DisplayPort, the Kirabook would have been able to drive a 27-inch display at its native resolution. I get it: HDMI is the most common digital video input on modern TVs and video projectors. But DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters are dirt cheap and easy to carry. Limiting the Kirabook to HDMI-out cripples the system for desktop use.

Toshiba is rightfully proud of the rigidity of the Kirabook's magnesium-alloy chassis, but the lid housing its display flexes enough to do the limbo. It feels alarmingly fragile. The other half, which encloses the keyboard and motherboard, feels remarkably strong considering how thin it is. The machine weighs only 2.97 pounds, and it measures just 0.7 inch thick when closed. The Kirabook is one of the prettiest laptops I’ve seen, with nary a hard edge to be felt. Unsightly features such as cooling vents and speaker grilles stay hidden while this Ultrabook is in use.

Toshiba's engineers should be proud of their ability to render the Kirabook so quiet with vents that are all but invisible when the machine is running.

The Kirabook’s backlit keyboard offers very good tactile feedback, and its monolithic touchpad—which also supports Windows 8 gestures—tracks smoothly and accurately. The left and right mouse buttons are integrated into the touchpad itself, helping to keep the overall design clean and elegant.

In addition to HDMI-out, the Kirabook has three USB 3.0 ports, a media card reader, and a combo microphone/headphone jack. It lacks a hardwired ethernet port, however. Exacerbating that problem is Toshiba’s decision to use Intel’s Centrino Wireless-N 2230 Wi-Fi adapter, which is limited to networks operating on the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band. Come on, Toshiba, this is supposed to be a luxury offering!

As you’ve probably guessed, the machine has no optical drive. The Harman/Kardon audio system, though, sounds much better than I expected, generating relatively full-range sound and a wide stereo field from the speakers’ left and right locations on the bottom of the unit.

The tiny Harman/Kardon speakers sound much better than I expected.

The Kirabook achieved a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 284, versus the 100-point score of our reference notebook, Asus’s VivoBook S550CA. Much of that performance delta can be attributed to the Kirabook’s SSD (the VivoBook has just a 24GB SSD acting as a cache for a 500GB mechanical hard drive). The Kirabook also delivered better performance in most of the other tests that make up the WorldBench suite, but those differences weren’t nearly as dramatic as the storage-performance results. And you shouldn’t expect to play hard-core games on either system, but that’s clearly not the audience Toshiba is going after with this product.

The audience Toshiba is pursuing with the Kirabook is the well-to-do professional who is willing to pay extra for services such as dedicated, United States-based telephone tech support. Toshiba goes so far as to guarantee Kirabook buyers that such calls will be answered within 45 seconds. If that’s inconvenient, you can schedule a date and time when a tech-support person will call you, instead. And should you need to send your unit in for repairs during its two-year warranty period, Toshiba will pay for overnight shipping.

Toshiba should have outfitted the Kirabook with a gigabit ethernet port.

The Kirabook is the most beautiful Ultrabook to pass through the PCWorld Labs, but its inability to drive a large external monitor at native resolution, a lid that flexes like a contortionist, a Wi-Fi adapter restricted to 2.4GHz networks, and a display that doesn’t deliver as much contrast as the Retina display Toshiba wants consumers to compare it to make this machine’s sky-high price tag hard to swallow.

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Toshiba Kirabook Challenges MacBook Air with Retina-Like Display (Video)

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5 Best Toshiba Laptops

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Toshiba Best and Worst Notebook Brands 2013 Rating

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Hands On With the Toshiba Excite 13

When is a tablet no longer a tablet? One might ask that question when looking at the Toshiba Excite 13, even though it is clearly a tablet given its lack of an integrated keyboard. The largest of any tablet announced or shipping, this slate is all about its generous display. But does a 13-inch display make a tablet too unwieldy?

At CES 2012, when news of Toshiba's 13.3-inch tablet prototype hit, I heard many snickers from colleagues who said that it was too big to be useful as a tablet. Make no mistake, it is indeed big: It measures 13.5 by 8.3 by 0.4 inches, and weighs 2.2 pounds. It is the antithesis of the svelte, smaller Toshiba Excite 7.7. But although it is noticeably heavier than most tablets, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Excite 13 felt balanced in the hand. Using it is mostly a two-handed, landscape affair, but it still works well.

Undeterred by the Excite 13's size, I dove right in with this tablet and began using it for a variety of tasks: viewing images, browsing the Web, playing games, and writing documents. The big screen served me well when I had a surface to rest the tablet on, but it felt a bit awkward in my lap. For the most part, the large screen captivated me, drawing me into the content and navigation in a way that other tablets have not. My touch typing was more accurate on the soft Android keyboard, too. I found myself caught up in using the Excite 13, to the point that I had to remind myself to switch my attention away from the tablet and back to the tasks at hand--such as writing this article.

In the end, the Excite 13 proved to me that a 13.3-inch tablet can be quite compelling for many uses. Admittedly, using one involves sacrificing a bit of privacy: The big screen is large enough that your neighbor on the airplane or at the café might clearly see what you're reading, for example.

This clearly isn't a tuck-and-go tablet, either. But the Excite 13 can pair well with another flat device, such as a laptop, stashed in your briefcase or backpack; you can use the tablet as a second screen, an arrangement that's especially convenient if you orient the tablet vertically for viewing documents or Web pages, since you'll get a lot of information on screen in a single go. The tablet stands wider than my two-year-old, 13.3-inch Toshiba R700 notebook (because the tablet's display has a broader bezel to accommodate the electronics and ports), but not so much so that it's obtrusive.

One drawback of this 13.3-inch tablet lies in how Google's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system handles on such a large display. Apps like Google's Play Music and Amazon's MP3 Cloud Player don't scale well to take advantage of the screen real estate. Vector Unit's Riptide GP looked good, but other games were a bit more fuzzy than I expected; presumably this happened because the games' assets don't match the 1600-by-900-pixel resolution of the tablet. Still other apps, such as 8Tracks, may be intended to scale between small and large screens, but on a display this large, images seemed grainy and pixelated.

Unfortunately, these weaknesses are tied to how Android and developers handle large screens in general. This means you'll get inconsistent results: When an app works well, it works very well, and when it doesn't, you're left wondering why Google let a free Scrabble game for phones be recognized as a tablet app.

When you're not using the Excite 13 on its own or as a complement to your laptop's screen, you might want to use it as a second screen in your living room. Unfortunately, the tablet lacks an IR port for use with a remote control app; an IR port is the one thing that would have made the Excite 13 truly appropriate for use on your couch.

While the big display comes in handy for working in productivity apps or viewing movies, it is especially immersive for playing games. Carrying a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor inside, the Excite 13 is perfect for gaming; on our GL Benchmark tests, the Excite 13 scored right in line with what we've come to expect from Tegra 3-based tablets.

In the end, though, it's price, not size, that constrains the Excite 13 the most. Though its size alone means that it isn't the tablet for everyone, its price will be the ultimate deterrent to adoption. The 32GB model costs $650, while the 64GB version costs $750. For those prices, you can buy a reasonably nice ultraportable laptop, or perhaps come close to the price of the slim Ultrabook you've had your eye on. No, those products aren't slates, but you'd potentially get more all-around use out of a laptop than you would out of a large tablet.

In spite of these weaknesses, Toshiba deserves credit for taking a chance on the 13.3-inch tablet design. For entertainment, as well as for document creation and consumption, the Excite 13 is like no other tablet available today. But the price of admission is steep.

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Hands On With the Toshiba Excite 7.7 Android 4.0 Tablet

Long before the Toshiba Excite 7.7 got its name, its prospects were cause for excitement. The tablet's beefy Nvidia Tegra 3-powered specs, its slim and lightweight design, its Android 4.02 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and its high-resolution AMOLED display all made it a front-runner challenger on paper.

Now that it's here, I can report that this model fully lives up to its potential. The only disappointment lies with its steep price: $500 for the 16GB version--the same as the larger-screen third-generation iPad costs--and $580 for the 32GB model.

Next to the iPad's pricing, the Toshiba Excite 7.7 (previously seen at Mobile World Congress as the Toshiba AT270) feels astronomically expensive. That said, it comes in priced just 11 percent higher than the next closest competitor, the Verizon Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, which is $450 with a two-year contract. Granted, the Verizon model handles 4G LTE wireless communications, but that tablet is also stuck on last year's Android 3.x Honeycomb operating system. And its dual-core CPU performance is notably slower than that of the Tegra 3-based Excite 7.7.

At least the design of the Excite 7.7 matches its premium price. Aesthetically, it pleases the eye, and it's in keeping with the design of the 10.1-inch and 13.0-inch models in the Excite lineup, sporting a bronze-colored, textured aluminum back with matching plastic edges and well-defined buttons for the volume rocker, power, and rotation-lock slider.

The design is deceptive: Though the Excite 7.7 lacks the contour of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, the two models are of identical depth, 0.31 inch. The Excite 7.7 is slightly larger than the Tab, standing 8.1 inches tall to the Tab's 7.7 inches; and at 12.3 ounces (or 0.77 pound), it's a bit heavier than the Tab, by 3.2 ounces (or 0.2 pound). Interestingly, the Toshiba tablet feels lighter in the hand, probably due to the balance of the components inside.

The weight of the Excite 7.7 is actually one of the more enticing features, as it indicates that LCD-based tablets are starting to approach a weight that's conducive for one-handed operation. The Excite 7.7 is not as featherlight as current E Ink-based e-readers are (some e-readers are half the Excite's weight), but it is notably light when held one-handed--a critical distinction, and advantage, for a smaller tablet like this. After all, many users like to hold their slate one-handed when they're reading, and the Excite 7.7's high-resolution display makes it ideal for that activity.

High-Res Display

The high-resolution AMOLED display is another major cause for excitement here. Android tablets have been painfully slow to get on the bandwagon of higher-pixel-density displays, and this model is one of the few to do so. At 1280 by 800 pixels, the display has 196 pixels per inch, not as dense as what the current 9.7-inch iPad has, but far better than what the 1024-by-600 Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 delivers. In my hands-on trials, text looked lovely in ebooks and Web pages, smooth and solidly rendered--and a welcome contrast to the pixelation I've seen on the lower-res competition. The 16:10-aspect-ratio display uses Corning Gorilla Glass and supports ten-finger multitouch, and it was highly responsive when I tried it.

Toshiba says the display is comparable to Samsung's Super AMOLED Plus technology, and I'd have to agree after a side-by-side comparison. Colors looked identical, with similarly high saturation but no oversaturation. The Samsung display was slightly better at handling blacks and whites; Toshiba's screen crushed the blacks and washed out the brightest whites in our grayscale-image test. Beyond that, though, the Toshiba tablet simply excelled at images, producing eye-popping color and reasonably good skin tones. On one of our standard test images, the Excite 7.7 provided one of the better representations we've seen of the skin tones and clothing; it lacked the moiré pattern evident on the Samsung model, though whether this result is due to the difference in operating systems (with the Samsung tablet still on Android 3.x) or something else is unclear. The Excite 7.7 also rendered images sharply, although--as with the other current Android tablets we've seen--images in the Gallery app had fuzzy thumbnails, and needed a moment to render fully when opened.

The last piece of big news about the Excite 7.7 is its Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. Tegra 3 is terrific for gaming; on our GL Benchmark tests, the Excite 7.7 performed in line with other Tegra 3 tablets. Games looked great on the display as well.

Additional Features

The Excite 7.7 has a MicroSD card slot (which supports up to MicroSDXC cards) and a Micro-USB On-The-Go port on the bottom, along with a conveniently placed (for landscape use) headphone jack. It also has a 2-megapixel front camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with flash, plus a proprietary docking connector for charging. The connector is larger and bulkier than most, as on previous Toshiba tablets; however, the unit appeared to charge more quickly in my hands-on tests (formal results and full battery life tests still to come).

Toshiba hasn't customized Android 4.0 much on the Excite 7.7, but the company has preinstalled some handy widget icons on the home screen; these widgets group related apps together for easy access. The company also tosses in a slew of useful apps and a handful of games to get you started.

The Toshiba Excite 7.7's zippy performance, light weight, and terrific display make for great usability. Now, if only the price of admission to this particular tablet ride weren't so high.

Stay tuned for PCWorld's fully rated Excite 7.7 review, with our updated tablet testing suite.

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Toshiba Excite 10 LE Review: Lightweight Tablet, Unfortunate Display

In a sea of me-too tablet slabs, the Toshiba Excite 10 LE—running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)—distinguishes itself on two key metrics. First, at 1.18 pounds, it's the lightest 10-inch-size tablet we've seen to date. Second, it's the slimmest, measuring just 0.3 inch thick. Sadly, Toshiba made a few questionable design choices in its construction and display that detract from using it, and make it a poor choice.

Another reason to stay clear: You'll be paying a little extra for the 16GB version: $530, versus $499 for the 16GB Apple iPad. (For 32GB, you'll pay $600—the same price as Apple's iPad, but $100 more than Asus charges for its same-capacity—and better-performing—Transformer Prime.)

Design Trade-Offs

Make no mistake about the engineering significance of Toshiba's Excite 10 LE: Constructed of magnesium alloy, the tablet feels noticeably lighter than competing models, including the close-in-weight Samsung Galaxy Tab Wi-Fi 10.1 (1.23 pounds). The Excite 10 LE was well balanced in the hand, and felt easy to hold one-handed in the vertical or portrait orientation, a common way of holding a tablet for reading books, magazines, and the like. No fewer than a dozen editors around the office handled the Excite, and all preferred the weight of the Excite over that of the Apple iPad 2, the current iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, or the Asus Transformer Prime.

The slim design does come with some trade-offs in physical construction. For one thing, the tablet is squared off around the bottom edges, which means that the Excite lacks the comfy, smooth tapering found on the iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and the Asus Transformer Prime. For another, the edges of the tablet have some give and some gaps, so that they actually flex away from the Gorilla Glass screen. While I wouldn't go so far as to say it feels as if it would snap in use, I wouldn't want to toss it into a jammed backpack and put any serious stress on it; an iPad could withstand that, but the Excite does not feel as if it would.

A few more design gripes, and one plus: The plus is that the Excite conveniently puts all of its ports—including microUSB (with support for USB On-the-Go, an unusual find), micro-HDMI, and microSD—in a row, along the left-hand side in landscape orientation. Above those ports sits the awkwardly-placed headphone jack. And the the slim, hard-plastic buttons for power, volume, and rotation lock—running along the top of the tablet when you hold it in landscape mode—lack distinction and are awkward to adjust, which makes them decidedly annoying to use. Finally, Toshiba continues to rely on a bulky proprietary charging cable that plugs into the centrally located dock connector (and jacks into the USB brick for power). Yet, oddly, you don't use this cable to transfer data directly to the tablet; for that task, you'll need a microUSB cable.

Mediocre Performance

The Excite 10 LE is the first Honeycomb tablet I've used in a while that had quite as many glitches and crashes as the Excite did. The Excite uses Texas Instruments' OMAP 4430 processor, which makes me speculate that perhaps Toshiba and TI need to work harder on optimizing the Excite hardware to work with Android 3.2.1 Honeycomb. Or perhaps Toshiba's implementation of the OMAP processor somehow makes processing tradeoffs in order to provide better battery life and performance in the tablet's slim form.

Whatever the reason, be aware that the Excite, with its launch software, crashed often on Google's own apps. The camera app crashed frequently; so did the Gallery app, e-mail, and the Web browser. Other programs I tried seemed fine; still others seemed to chug along compared with a smoother experience on other Android models. Toshiba says the Excite is upgradable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but really, with no solid ETA for that upgrade, it's a thin promise from a company that hasn't had a good update track record. It's also odd that it's taking Toshiba so long, since the company doesn't do any custom launchers or overlay tweaks to Android; instead, the company just loads on a bunch of apps to get you going out the gate, apps that include Netflix, Quickoffice, and Toshiba's own media player app.

Besides crashes, I noticed another glitch in the Gallery app when I viewed a folder of high-resolution digital SLR images. Like some other Android tablets (including several of the Samsung Galaxy Tab models running the TouchWiz software), the Excite struggles with properly rendering these high-resolution images on the first go. At least, though, the Excite gets there, sharpening up the preview render without requiring you to do something like zooming into the image first (as the affected Samsung models do). But it takes a moment, and your eyes can often feel as if someone's playing a trick on you.

Beyond the glitchy software, the Excite has a few other performance issues. Specifically, overall responsiveness was sluggish, and the touchscreen didn't always respond smoothly to my fingers.

The Excite 10 LE scored poorly in our display tests, too. The display lacked the color accuracy and clarity of like-resolution tablets. More critically, all of our test screens—from still images to a Web page to test patterns—were marred by a tattoolike pattern imprinted on the display. The pattern is actually the touchscreen interface itself, and it's more distracting—more visible—than the usual screen-door, gridlike touch technologies seen on other tablets.

On our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark browser speed test, the Excite was right in the mix, and on our custom Web-page loading test, it took 2.9 seconds to load a page—faster than the iPad 2's 3.3 seconds, and slower than the Transformer Prime's 2.6 seconds. On the GLBenchmark test with antialiasing off, it was competitive with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Wi-Fi, at 30.9 frames per second, but far short of the Transformer Prime's 56 fps. Finally, in our subjective testing, stills and videos produced by the Excite's camera were judged only fair; images had a lot of noise, and lacked sharpness.

Bottom Line

Physically, the Excite 10 LE still excites me, but solely from the standpoint of the ideal it represents in weight and size. I look forward to the day when tablet makers can achieve lighter weights and thinner designs, as the Excite has, but do so without making a slew of usability, performance, and price tradeoffs. As it stands, however, this lightweight tablet has to be relegated to the annals of tablet experiments.

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Toshiba Satellite P755D Review: Middle of the Road, With Blu-ray and Good Sound

The Toshiba Satellite P755D is a decent multimedia laptop, with a Blu-ray drive, Harman/Kardon stereo speakers, and a 15.6-inch widescreen high-def display. This "high-performance" model in Toshiba's "everyday value" Satellite line lists for $700 (as of April 2, 2012). Its quad-core AMD processor won't set any speed records, however.

Toshiba pays attention to multimedia. The Dolby Advanced and Waves MaxxAudio systems produce great sound even at high volume, both from the speakers and over earphones. An HDMI port lets you hook up to your HDTV to play Blu-ray movies, too. Regrettably, the 15.6-inch display has a relatively low resolution of 1366 by 768--and since the screen is mirror-shiny, avoiding reflections is hard.

The microphone port has a potentially handy feature called Toshiba Sleep and Music, which lets you play your MP3 player through the laptop’s speakers, even when the laptop itself is powered off. In addition, you can charge your digital devices through the USB Sleep and Charge port, which also operates even when the laptop is turned off, though it will drain the battery unless you've plugged the laptop into the wall.

Ports are plentiful, including VGA, ethernet, three USB connections and one USB 3.0 port with the aforementioned Sleep and Charge, headphone and microphone jacks, a security lock slot, and a memory-card reader (on the front edge). The P755D also comes with Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. The 640GB hard drive has a "Toshiba HDD Protection" impact sensor that automatically parks the drive head to protect the hard-drive surface from damage should you bump the laptop. A pop-up warns you if the machine is bumped and the heads are being parked; you will be surprised how easily you can provoke it into action.

Across the top of the keyboard are the power button and touch-sensitive buttons for wireless, the Eco power-saving utility, speaker on/off, and volume control.

The keyboard is nice: Its smooth, large, black keys are reasonably responsive, though their descent is not as deep as on a more expensive Dell Inspiron, for example. The multitouch touchpad is tricky to use--whenever I accidentally touched it with two fingers, the cursor froze, and each time I had to take a moment to figure out what was wrong. The touchpad buttons are a bit stiff, too. A button turns on a light for the control buttons across the top of the keyboard, as well as a light bar across the top of the touchpad, but the rest of the keyboard is not backlit.

Unfortunately, the performance of this affordable laptop isn't exactly stellar. The AMD Fusion A8-3520M processor can't keep up with Intel's Core i5 or i7 CPU on general computing tasks, and in our tests the P755D limped along with a modest WorldBench 7 score of 54. AMD is known for its integrated-graphics performance, and here the system takes a step up--at modest quality settings, you can play modern games at a reasonable performance level (in our tests, it ran Dirt 3 at 28 frames per second at high detail and the native screen resolution of 1366 by 768). The battery lasted 4 hours, 42 minutes, which is a middling result for this category of laptop.

The Satellite P755D comes with Microsoft Office Starter 2010, which consists of Word and Excel with advertising. That’s the only major built-in application, though the laptop also comes with Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, plus Toshiba DVD playback software and a Corel Blu-ray player. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the Corel Blu-ray player to work; I downloaded a free player to watch a Blu-ray movie, and that worked fine.

In addition to the Microsoft Live Essentials suite of Photo Gallery, Mail, Movie Maker, Messenger, and the Live Writer blogging application, Toshiba provides two custom programs: Toshiba Book Place for obtaining free and paid electronic books, and Toshiba Apps Place for accessing a lengthy list of small games, utilities, and applications (some are free, some are trials, a few are paid). Getting into Toshiba Book Place (a rebranded Blio book store) takes some time, however, as it requires moving through several lengthy and problematic software updates that you cannot bypass. Most of the programs in Toshiba Apps Place are minor, similar to those disks of freeware games and utilities you used to get with a computer magazine subscription.

The Toshiba Online Backup utility pops up early and cannot be dismissed; you must set it up whether you want to or not. I didn't want to, so I found this tool almost as annoying as the included Norton Internet Security, a pest of a program that nags you about activating the 30-day trial every time you start the computer. I suppose it might be wise to browbeat new computer users into installing some basic level of security, but experienced users with security preferences of their own will not be amused. As for missing applications, I thought Skype was installed--a Skype sticker sits right there on the keyboard--but the laptop has only a link to download Skype. Odd that it wouldn't be preinstalled.

The Toshiba Eco Utility, which you enable with the press of a button, automatically reduces the laptop's power consumption by turning down the screen brightness, shutting off the hard drive when not in use, putting the machine to sleep if idle, and adjusting CPU use (for this quad-core AMD A8, presumably it disables one or more cores when the system is under low load, though the documentation is not specific). It also displays a live graph of your wattage use, and even estimates how much less carbon dioxide you are causing to be emitted under the Eco feature. Leaving aside the arguable virtues of saving the Earth by turning off CPU cores, I guess this button can serve as a handy shortcut for extending the P755D's battery life when you're on a cross-country flight.

Hardware documentation consists of a startup card and an online guide buried in a Toshiba subdirectory. I know we're all about electronic documentation and preventing trees from being cut down just to explain the system, but at least the company could have put an icon to the online guide on the toolbar, or on the otherwise bare Windows 7 desktop. You get no software documentation at all.

At 5.4 pounds, the P755D is no ultralight, but it's not too heavy for its size; some weight savings may be due to the all-plastic casing. Fortunately, the plastic is solid and doesn’t bend.

The Toshiba Satellite P755D is a decent all-purpose laptop, not too thick and, though plastic, pretty solid. Performance in our tests was quite modest, though it has some nice multimedia features. Faster performance, accessible documentation, less-annoying backup and virus utilities, and a plain touchpad without the quirky multitouch would generate more enthusiasm and higher scores, but this model is fine as a middle-of-the-road laptop with a modest price.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Toshiba Qosmio X775-Q7170 Review: Is 'Entry-Level Desktop Replacement' an Oxymoron?

The Qosmio X775-Q7170 is the entry-level model of the Qosmio X770 series of desktop replacement laptops. The Q7170 sports the same snazzy design as other laptops in the series: a 17.3-inch widescreen, a red-backlit keyboard, and a fade-to-red color scheme. However, it comes packed with some less-impressive hardware components and no 3D display.

Our review model, priced at $1150 (as of March 23, 2012), has an Intel Core i5-2450M processor, 6GB of DDR3 memory, a 640GB hard-disk drive spinning at 7200 rpm, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M graphics card. Since the graphics card doesn't support 3D Vision, Toshiba offers a tray-loading DVD-SuperMulti drive in lieu of a Blu-ray disc player. The X775-Q7170 has built-in Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n) and Bluetooth 3.0, and it runs 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

The X775-Q7170 earned a score of 82 on our new WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, which means that it was approximately 18 percent slower than our baseline configuration, which has an i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card. This score isn't stellar for a desktop replacement laptop, but it's not bad for the price.

The Qosmio looks like its brothers in the X770 family, which is a good thing if you favor the chunky, plastic, super-polished gaming rig look. The chassis is almost entirely dressed in striated gray plastic, except for the very bottom of the lid (when the computer is open), and the very top of the keyboard deck, where the gray gives way to shiny metallic red. My colleague Jon L. Jacobi likens the Qosmio's casing to a tricked-out street racing car, and that's exactly what it looks like: shiny, fast, and a little tacky.

Toshiba also slaps the Qosmio logo on the lid of the machine in red mirrored plastic, which only serves to make the entire thing look cheaper and more garish.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan of the Qosmio's overall look. But if you like gaming rigs with lots of shine and pretty lights, this may be the machine for you. The X775-Q7170 has a large keyboard with red backlights.

Turning the keyboard light on doesn't just light up the keyboard; it also lights up a strip across the top of the touchpad and six of the seven touch buttons located above the keyboard. I admit that the red lights look pretty cool when the entire machine lights up.

Aside from the full-size keyboard with ten-key number pad, the Qosmio's keyboard deck contains a large touchpad (with two discrete buttons and an on/off switch), and seven touch buttons (Eco Mode toggle, Wi-Fi toggle, Keyboard Light toggle, Play/Pause, Mute, Volume Down, and Volume Up). On either side of the touch buttons are two Harman/Kardon stereo speakers (Toshiba also supplies a bottom-mounted woofer for extra audio kick).

The keyboard's Chiclet-style keys are smallish, but they provide good feedback and are less stiff than smaller keys tend to be. The touchpad has a slightly rough texture, which seemed to trip up the smoothness and precision of my typing. The touchpad's large buttons are composed of shiny plastic and feel a little flimsy, as though they might break within a year. Since this is a desktop replacement, I suggest using an external mouse.

The Qosmio X775-Q7170 offers a generous selection of ports, considering that a large battery, fan, and optical drive occupy most of the back end. You get four USB ports (three USB 2.0, and one USB 3.0 with Sleep and Charge), VGA- and HDMI-out, gigabit ethernet, headphone and microphone jacks, and a lock slot. You'll find a memory card reader on the front of the machine.

This desktop replacement sports a glossy, 17.3-inch LED-backlit display with a native resolution of 1600 by 900. The screen generally looks good, with bright colors, good contrast, and decent off-axis viewing angles, but it falls short of full HD, and that fact is noticeable on such a large display. You can distinguish individual pixels, which makes content--including images, video, and text--look slightly fuzzy. At the desktop replacement level, this is definitely a bummer.

Video played smoothly on the laptop, despite the fuzziness. Basic HD streaming and DVD playback worked without a hitch, but you may want to consider another machine if you're looking for a strong gaming rig. In our Crysis 2 gaming test, the X775-Q7170 earned a mark of 69 out of 100, and managed frame rates of around 46 frames per second (at high quality, and 1366 by 768 resolution). Audio sounded good, however, thanks to the bottom-mounted woofer and the top-mounted speakers. The headphone jack delivered excellent sound, too.

The Qosmio X775-Q7170 disappoints as a gaming machine/desktop replacement, and it's too big to function well for any other purpose. Thanks to the extra-large battery that protrudes from the bottom of the laptop, the machine does get decent battery life for its category (about 4 hours, 30 minutes in our tests), but that means little when you're lugging around an 8-pound machine. Still, if you're looking for a laptop that you can play games on in a pinch, this model might be worth considering.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Toshiba 7.7-inch Tegra 3 Tablet Appears, Slashes Zombies in Vibrant AMOLED Color

Toshiba has yet to announce that it’s coming out with a 7,7-inch, quad-core Tegra 3 tablet, but that didn’t stop the company from displaying a very intriguing demo unit at Nvidia’s Mobile World Congress booth. We had the opportunity to hands-on with as-yet unnamed Android 4.0 slate and came away impressed with its brilliant 1280 x 800 AMOLED display, superthin design, and ability to play high-res games with great aplomb.

As we approached its display table, the first thing we noticed about the Toshiba 7.7-inch Tegra 3 tablet was just how vibrant the default Ice Cream Sandwich wallpaper with its multicolored stripes appeared. Because the display is only 7.7-inches, the 1280 x 800 pixels give it a 196 PPI, much sharper than the 150.4 PPI that 10-inch competitors with the same resolution offer. The glossy glass on top of the panel helped the colors pop, but also produced some serious glare, forcing us to move the tablet around a lot while filming to avoid getting light spots in our footage.

The Toshiba 7.7-inch tablet’s design aesthetic is nothing like those of its bulky Thrive line. The device has rounded edges, a super glossy screen, and chrome accents that reminded us of the Pantech Element. A silver textured back could looked more like an Acer or ASUS aesthetic. Perhaps the most startling difference between this device and the Thrive 7 is its thinness. Where both the Thrive 7-inch and original 10-inch Thrive were heavy and chunky, this new design is extremely light. Exact weight and measurements were not available.

With its quad-core Tegra 3 CPU, the Toshiba 7.7-inch tablet is a lot more than a pretty face. The demo unit had a recent beta version of Bladeslinger, an upcoming first-person action game  where you control a cowboy who has to fight a hoard of deadly zombies, usually with knives. Images of the cowboy, the environment around him, and the zombies were crisp and highly-detailed. 

There’s no word yet on pricing, availability, or even a name for this Toshiba 7.7-inch tablet, but we really like what we’ve seen and hope to see this product in a final form.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here