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Toshiba NB205

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:00:18 -0600

Getting it right the first time

Toshiba waited a long time to enter the netbook market, but as the NB205 proves, taking some time to learn from your competitors can be a good thing. The NB205 offers everything we expect from a netbook, as well as some unexpected bonus features, and does so for less than $400. We liked the NB205 when we used it in our netbook upgrading feature (October); here we give it a full review.

The NB205 has a matte-silver plastic chassis and a textured matte lid, available in blue, pink, black, white, or brown. We appreciate that Toshiba has bucked the glossy fingerprint-magnet trend here. The netbook is solidly constructed, with a color-matched glossy bezel and hinge. The included six-cell battery protrudes about a half an inch beyond the back of the netbook, and is slightly wobbly to the touch, but given the 6:45 (hr:min) battery life, a little wobble doesn’t bother us.

As we discovered in our netbook upgrading feature, both RAM and hard drive are easily accessible, although the hard drive panel uses TORX-6 fasteners rather than the more common Phillips head screws found on the RAM compartment. Still, if you’re ponying up for an SSD or larger hard drive for your netbook, you can probably spare a few bucks for a TORX-6 driver, too.

The NB205 looks good and runs well. But why is the tilde key down between the Alt key and the space bar?

The NB205 sports the standard array of ports: three USB 2.0, VGA, audio jacks, 10/100 Ethernet, and an SD card reader. Remember the bonus features we talked about? One of the USB ports is a Sleep-and-Charge port, so you can charge your phone or other USB-powered gadget even when the computer is off. It’s an addition so obvious we wish more netbook makers included it. We also appreciate the hard drive movement sensor.

The chiclet keyboard is easy to type on—the keys are more widely spaced than most, so you’re less likely to hit the wrong key. It’s not perfect, though—some keys are in strange places (for example, the tilde key is between Alt and the space bar), and pushing too hard on a center key causes the whole keyboard to flex slightly. The touchpad is textured, and as wide as the space bar, while the buttons are responsive and clicky, albeit identical in texture to the chassis.

Because the NB205 has the same guts as every other non-Ion Atom N280 netbook out there, we expected it to perform at least as well as our favorite 10-incher, the Asus Eee 1000HE, and slightly faster than our N270-bound zero-point system, the 12-inch Lenovo S12 (reviewed last month). And it did perform between three and five percent better than the zero point in our Photoshop, MainConcept, and Quake III tests. It’s a nice (if small) boost; the equivalent of winning a 100-meter dash by a hundredth of a second—the netbook world has yet to find its Usain Bolt.

With a lap weight of two pounds, 15 ounces, the NB205 is firmly in the middle of the netbook weight class. Its price, battery life, aesthetics, and performance put it near the top of the current generation, and we appreciate perks like Sleep-and-Charge. It’s one of the best netbooks on the market today. But TORX screws on the hard drive compartment? Toshiba, you were so close.

Toshiba Touts Largest Capacity (320GB) 1.8-Inch Hard Drive

Paul Lilly — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:30:52 -0600

The most capacious 1.8-inch hard drive on the planet now checks in at 320GB, says Toshiba, who just introduced a new line of tiny HDDs

Toshiba's targeting thin and light mobile PCs and portable external HDD contraptions with its new storage series, which also includes two other models sized at 160GB and 250GB. All three drives sport a perpendicular magnetic recording head, efficient power consumption, a high level of durability, and quiet seek operation, Toshiba says.

The new drives come equipped with a SATA interface and spin at 5400RPM. All three models also include a 16MB buffer. Combined with improvements to areal density, Toshiba claims you can expect data transfer rates to improve by 15 percent over previous drives.

Toshiba's tiny drives will start mass production in December. No word yet on price.

Image Credit: Toshiba

Toshiba and Hitachi Also Under Fire for Antitrust Issues

Paul Lilly — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:40:16 -0500

Sony isn't the only one in hot water with U.S. antitrust regulators. Both Toshiba and Hitachi have also fallen under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of Justice and will have their optical device divisions investigated, The Inquirer reports.

Once again, not a whole lot of details are yet known, but just like with Sony, it's believed that the DoJ is sniffing out something afoul with each optical makers' Blu-ray line. More specifically, it's likely each company is being probed for potential price fixing allegations.

Before being knocked out of contention, HD-DVD players could be snagged for as low as $99, which coincided with a promotion to receive a small handful of free HD-DVD movies through the mail. For the most part, Blu-ray pricing has yet to come down to the same level. It should also be noted that Sony, Hitachi, and Toshiba account for about 60 percent of the optical drive market, according to some statistics.

Analysts Predict PC Makers Will Look to Expand to Smartphones

Jason Barry — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:12:10 -0500

The mobile phone market boasts worldwide sales growth of 29 percent year-over-year to reach 180 million units. Smartphones are expected to account for 37 percent of global handset sales by 2012 with forecasted revenue of $191 million by 2012. So, what does that have to do with PC’s?

Analysts think that PC makers want a piece of that huge growth action. The growth percentages mentioned above are already far above that of worldwide PC sales numbers and outside of Apple, few PC makers have been able to cash in. Although, “PC vendors will find it difficult to simply use existing supply chains and channels to expand their presence in the smart phone market,” according to Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

Despite the difficulties, it is inevitable that more PC manufacturers will dip their toes into the success of mobile markets even though it is a very different ocean. Acer, Asus and Toshiba have all announced smartphone launches and this trend is expected to continue.

Toshiba's Dynario Fuel-Cell for Portable Electronics Will Change the Way You Charge Your Phone

Bart Salisbury — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:46:28 -0500

Toshiba has introduced the Dynario, a Direct Methanol Fuel-Cell (DMFC) charger for portable electronics. The palm-sized Dynario consists of the charging unit and methanol fuel, which mixes with ambient oxygen to produce a charge sufficient to power up a mobile phone or a digital-media player via a USB cable. With methanol fuel sold separately, the Dynario is reusable.

For the technically inclined, a DMFC is a type of proton-exchange fuel cell. Methanol is the chosen fuel because it is energy-dense yet reasonably stable. Proton-exchange fuel cells are not particularly efficient, which limits there application to portable applications where energy density is more important.

The Dynario will only be available in Japan, and only in limited quantities. Toshiba will produce 3,000 units, then sit back and gauge consumer reaction before deciding to make more. The Dynario goes on sale October 29, and will set you back ¥29,800 (roughly $324) for the device itself, and another ¥3,150 (a bit more than $34) for a set of five fuel cartridges.

Image Credit: Toshiba

Toshiba's Market Share Increases After Acquisition of Fujitsu HDDs

Bart Salisbury — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:26:13 -0500

Toshiba’s $328 million acquisition of hard drive maker Fujitsu is bearing some early fruit. The deal, made earlier this year, was an effort by Toshiba to increase it’s presence in the enterprise storage market. Toshiba acquired all of Fujitsu’s hard drive related business including design, development, manufacturing, and sales.

The result: Toshiba saw it’s global hard drive market share jump to 13.2%. Toshiba’s share of the 2.5-inch drive market rose 6.5 points, from 16.1% to 24.6%, while it’s share in the sub-2.5-inch market grew even more, 8.3 points, from 18.3% to 26.5%.

Toshiba’s future plans involve the development of solid-state drives that combine Toshiba’s NAND flash memory technology with Fujitsu’s enterprise hard drive technology.

Image Credit: Toshiba

Toshiba Portégé A605

Katherine Stevenson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:00:00 -0500

A top-of-the-line ultraportable in lower-rent wrapping

In our August 2009 ultraportable notebook roundup we fell hard for Toshiba’s Portégé R600—the lightest, sleekest ultraportable notebook we’d ever tested. At $2,150, however, that notebook isn’t cheap.

This month we tested Toshiba’s more affordable ultraportable, the Portégé A605, to see how this consumer-class model compares with its fancier business-class kin.

In looks, the two machines are quite different. While the R600 wowed us with its silver, svelte stylishness, the A605 looks more commonplace. Inside and out, it’s adorned with that shiny black plastic you see everywhere these days, which looks really good… until you smudge it. Its keyboard, thankfully, has the same fingerprint-proof silver coating as the R600’s, and more importantly, sports the same full-size dimensions that make typing on it easy. The A605, which measures 11.3x8.8x1.2 inches, is close in size to the R600, just not as wafer-thin, and it’s a noticeable three-quarters of a pound heavier. Like the R600, the A605 offers a generous selection of ports and expandability options, including a USB/eSATA port (in addition to two standard USB ports), an ExpressCard slot, and an SD media reader.

One of the few features the A605 doesn't share with the elite Portégé R600 is a transflective screen. This one is still serviceable outdoors, however.

Inside, the R600 and A605 sport the same ultra-low-voltage 1.4GHz Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo proc, the same 3GB of DDR2/667 RAM, the same Intel GS45 chipset, and nearly the same DVD burner (the R600’s has a slimmer profile). Besides all that, the A605’s 320GB hard drive is double the capacity of the R600’s.

Not surprisingly, the two machines perform similarly, although the R600 did ever-so-slightly edge out the A605 in our benchmarks. Photoshop and ProShow are mostly CPU-bound, so it’s hard to explain the small gap in those scores. Perhaps the A605’s larger hard drive plays a part, or maybe extra baggage in Vista Home Premium (vs. Vista Business) is at fault. Other variables could explain why the A605’s battery pooped out just shy of four hours in our video rundown test while the R600’s lasted almost a half-hour longer.

Neither the R600 nor the A605 are the best-performing ultraportables we’ve tested. That honor goes to HP’s 2530p and Lenovo’s X200s (both also reviewed in August), which featured 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo procs. The R600 overcame this deficit with its near-weightlessness. The less-expensive A605 doesn’t have this special quality. It does, however, have respectable performance, a strong feature set, and a damn good price.

Toshiba Readies Bevy of Laptops for Windows 7 Launch

Paul Lilly — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:00:33 -0500

If you think you're excited about the launch of Windows 7, you should check out Toshiba, who today announced a boatload of laptops ready for the OS's release.

Running the gamut from netbooks to full-blown desktop replacements, the lowest model in Toshiba's upcoming totem pole includes the 10.1-inch NB200 netbook series. For $400, you'll find a typical spec sheet consisting of an Intel Atom N280 processor, 1GB of DDR RAM a 160GB hard drive, and other decidedly netbookish specs.

Further up the pricing ladder is Toshiba's Satellite A500 series, which will sport a 16-inch HD screen. Underneath the hood, users will have a choice between an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Turion II Ultra foundation. Pricing starts at $590.

Towards the top sits the Satellite P500 series. These laptops will come with an 18.4-inch HD screen and also give users a choice between an Intel or AMD processor. Some models will also include a Blu-ray player and illuminating LED backlit keyboard.

And then there's the Qosmio X500 desktop replacement laptop, which will be available in two configurations. One will come with an 18.4-inch HD screen, 320GB hard drive spinning at 7200RPM, and 4GB of memory, while the other will boast two hard drives and a 64GB SSD, along with 6GB of memory. Pricing will start at $1,450 and $1,900 respectively.

Toshiba has plenty of other models on tap for an October 22nd launch, and so will everyone else. Stay tuned!

Image Credit: Toshiba