Toshiba's Mini Nb205

By Author: Aaron Webber
Total Articles: 26
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Like most of the low-cost companion PCs obtainable in stores, the mini NB205 helps you stay connected with a straightforward laptop that merely fits in a purse or backpack.

DESIGN
The Toshiba mini NB205 is the initial netbook (low-price, low-performance, ultraportable laptop) from Toshiba, but the design is undoubtedly one of the most attractive we've seen within the netbook category. Toshiba offers the NB205 in multiple colors, but the silver and "Sable Brown" color combination in our review unit looks quite nice. The screen lid is made of thin textured plastic with the Toshiba logo front and center in silver metalic plastic. Toshiba engineers made the interesting choice of placing the power button within the middle of the screen hinge where it is exposed even when the netbook is closed. At first I was concerned this could not be the really very best position since it means the power button could be accidentally triggered inside a backpack or laptop case, but the button is disabled if the screen lid is closed.

KEYBOARD & TOUCHPAD
The NB205 uses a new full-size keyboard that is fairly massive for ...
... a 10-inch netbook. At initial glance the NB205 looks to have one of the really very best keyboards on any of the current-generation netbooks. Unfortunately, that opinion rapidly changes once you start typing. Although the keys are nice and huge with excellent spacing to prevent typos, the keyboard falls victim to the same thin and flexible plastics used inside the construction of the chassis. If you apply anything a lot a lot more than light typing pressure you will feel the keyboard "bouncing" under your fingertips as the plastic keyboard frame bends under the weight of your hands. If Toshiba engineers places a support frame under the keyboard this problem could merely be fixed. On a a great deal happier note, the mini NB205 features the single really very best touchpad we've utilized on any netbook to date. The touchpad measures roughly 3.2 inches wide by 1.8 inches tall with standard-sized touchpad buttons that go all the way to the front edge of the netbook. In short, Toshiba made perfect use of the readily obtainable space and gives users a "real" touchpad rather than the half-sized touchpads utilized on most netbooks. The touchpad itself is an ALPS model with excellent sensitivity and only minor lag. The scroll zones required a bit of adjustment in our review unit, but once we increased the scroll speed everything seemed fine.

DISPLAY
The Toshiba NB205 uses a nice and bright 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display panel with a 1024 x 600 native resolution. I wish Toshiba offered the mini NB205 with a higher resolution screen for example the ones obtainable from Dell, HP, and Sony, but considering the $400 price point we can't complain too a great deal. Vertical viewing angles are average, with obvious color inversion when viewing from below and some over-exposed colors when viewed from above. Horizontal viewing angles are really good with colors only starting to shift at extreme wide viewing angles.

PERFORMANCE
The Toshiba mini NB205 offers similar performance to most netbooks, but that shouldn't be a surprise to most of our readers. The performance section of a netbook review is generally extremely boring compared to a full-featured notebook because most netbook have virtually identical specs. All Intel Atom-based netbooks have almost identical performance in terms of actual real-world use. Overall performance with the Intel Atom platform is really reasonable for daily activities like Web browsing, email, using Microsoft Office, listening to music, and watching DVD-quality movies. If you're in a bind you can even use Photo Editing Software like Photoshop or GIMP for fundamental image editing. The one and only performance-related issue that we encountered during our testing of the NB205 was related to bloatware. Toshiba decided to include some "helpful" applications for the webcam, battery monitoring, wireless controls and Norton antivirus ... all of which strain the netbook's limited resources and make the NB205 slower than it should be. While most netbooks finish booting into Windows XP (including launching all startup applications) in less than 45 seconds, the NB205 takes a great deal more than 70 seconds to finish loading all the bloatware during Windows startup. Read more Notebook Review & Guide