Published on May 23rd,2005 at 8:56 AM
By >Daimaou - G.G-B

Toshiba U100… mmmmaybe…

I had some fun with a Toshiba U100 this weekend, the latest ultra-portable with a Pentium M 1.1Ghz, a 60Gb HDD and a DVD bay in a package under 1kg. On paper, this is a very good machine, but I’ve had better first experiences with laptops than with this Toshiba…

Let’s start with the looks of this machine, which are rather… squarish… love it or hate it… but we prefer the round looks of a Muramasa CV-50F.

The killer aspect of this PC is its thickness with the DVD drive, a horrible brick that is not only rendering the U100 horrible to look at, but also much heavier. A good USB DVD drive would have been batter.

Other problem we found was not the small keyboard (you can’t have it all) but the mouse, which is almost unusable… a real torture. If the pointing device on an IBM is heaven, well, then this one is absolute hell, because it’s difficult to use and the problem was the same on all 4 demo machines we tried.


It’s impossible to give a final judgement of this device, but the looks, the thickness and the weight linked to the DVD drive, and the unusable mouse do not earn any good marks, so Toshiba should revise this machine, because we’re used to better things from them. Akihabara News prefers the Muramasa CV-50F by far, despite the power advantage of the U100. The Muramasa is more practical and definitely has better looks.

Category Pc
              
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Comments
 

  • Anonymous

    Thank you for this review and nice work!

    It continues to be more evident to me that the smaller the notebook becomes, the traditional keyboard and mouse design cannot be used and must be replaced with a functional trackstick or touch screen (such as the one in the OQO or Sony U) and the keyboard needs to be a thumb board similar to the ones used in SideKicks and Treos.

  • Anonymous

    Akibabara’s review states…”The killer aspect of this PC is its thickness with the DVD drive, a horrible brick that is not only rendering the U100 horrible to look at, but also much heavier. A good USB DVD drive would have been batter.” The docking station only weighs a pound, it isnt meant for portability, but for what docking stations are good for…docking the computer in an office and works great in a car. There are tons of usb dvd drives on the market and toshiba does offer this option. I wish all laptop manufacturers offered docking stations for their computers, it’s a neat feature especially if you are into car mounts.

    The keyboard size…which seems to be the common theme anytime a small computer comes out, yet he contridicts himself when he recommends the sharp as it has pretty much the same size keyboard if not smaller. It has a 1ghz transmeta…yawn! It’s the length of a 8.9 laptop yet has the same 7.2 screen. The external resolution is limited to 1600×1200 because of only 16mb of video ram where toshiba is qxga 2048×1536 with 64mb…has 1 to 2 hour longer battery life, a 60gb hard drive instead of a 20gb, b and g instead of just b, no docking capabilities, 256mb of ram where toshiba comes with 512 and the sharp is maxed out at 512 wher ethe toshiba goes to 1gb, and I don’t even see a pc card slot on the sharp…to me the sharp is a three year old computer. He essentially doesnt like the toshiba because as you can see in his picture he has large hands that most likely wont work well with the mouse…well, state that rather than writing something as illogical as claiming the sharp is the better product.

 

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