Toshiba Notebook

Toshiba NB200 Mini Notebook




By Irene Tham

THE solid build - so unlike the plastic feel of most netbooks of this price - is the first thing you notice about this Toshiba baby.

The glossy 10-inch LED display is one of the sharpest and produces the most vivid colours I have ever seen.

Though the default resolution is 1,024 x 600 pixels, you can bump up the numbers to 1,600 x 1,200 pixels.

If you do, the bigger screen will mean a lot more left-right and up-down scrolling.
Another plus is the generous touchpad - the same size as that on a laptop - for comfortable Web surfing and navigation.

One unique feature of the NB200 is that it comes with a sleep-and-charge USB 2.0 port that allows you to juice up your phones even when the netbook is turned off.

There are two other regular USB ports.

Its raised, tiled keyboard can be a plus or minus, depending on whether you like a strong or weak tactile key response.

I like keys that go click-clack.

To my disappointment, the keys are neither noisy nor tactile: I found myself pounding them rather strenuously.

Their comfortable large size (1.5cm x 1.2cm) hardly compensates for the uninspiring key response.

When fully opened, the NB200 tilts at 45 degrees like most netbooks.

But I expect a company as design-conscious as Toshiba to do better on screen tilt.
The netbook is extremely quiet.

It comes with a hard disk shock protection software that quickly turns off your hard drive if it suffered serious knocks to avoid damaging the disk.

Its three-cell lithium ion battery is able to last up to four hours on paper.

Based on Digital Life's experience with netbooks with batteries of 2,310 milliampere-hour, they usually last up to three hours only.

Other features are run-of-the-mill: Intel Atom N280 processor, Windows XP operating system, 1GB memory which can be upgraded to 2GB, 160GB storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and two-in-one media slot.

Other colours - white, indigo and pink - are available from the end of next month.

Final say

Its good build quality and vivid display are worth every dollar, if you do not mind the weak key response.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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