Jenneth Orantia17 May 2008, 12:01 PM
If you like your bling-bling, then you’ll love Toshiba’s new Satellite A300 notebook.
This machine goes all-out in the name of in-your-face fashion, with a pin-stripe grey pattern on the lid and around the keyboard, a high-gloss finish that covers the entire notebook, white LEDs and chrome-covered mouse buttons.
Pushing 3kgs, it isn’t a light notebook by any standard, and it’s quite thick around the middle, measuring close to 4cm at its thickest point. But these hefty dimensions are forgivable once you consider the A300’s impressive specs. It uses Intel’s top-of-the-range 2.5GHz T9300 Core 2 Duo processor, as well as 4GB of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon 3650 processor – the same specs as the ASUS M70 we’ve also reviewed this month.
Thankfully, the Toshiba doesn’t suffer from the same performance lag of the M70, despite a healthy helping of pre-installed software. The PCMark05 score of 6,052 is well above average for a notebook in this price range, making it a solid machine for office productivity. Nor is it half bad for gaming, scoring 3,894 in 3DMark06. We were able to get Crysis running at a semi-decent clip using the lowest quality settings, but it’s too jittery to be playable for long stretches.
Unique to the A300 is the USB sleep and charge feature, which lets you charge compatible gadgets from any of the four USB ports while the notebook is asleep or in hibernation. This worked for all the gadgets we tried save for a 16GB iPod touch (although our 80GB 5.5G iPod recharged without a problem).
Another interesting feature we’re seeing more of in high-end notebooks is facial recognition for logging into Windows. We haven’t been too impressed with this on other machines, but the Toshiba was marginally better. It worked well in different lighting conditions and wasn’t fooled by different hairstyles or reading glasses, but it couldn’t recognise us with a hat on.
We were prepared to hate the A300’s keyboard, which deviates from convention by using a glossy rather than matte finish. It certainly feels different, but after giving it a solid workout we found it didn’t make much of a difference for touch typing. The downside is that after a few minutes of typing, fingerprints are clearly visible and make the keyboard look grimy.
Another quibble is the 15.4in display. It’s a good-sized screen, but the resolution is limited at 1,280 x 768 – a pixel count we’re used to seeing on smaller displays. Colours are also washed out, and horizontal and vertical viewing angles are narrower than normal. The harman/kardon speakers produce sound that’s well-balanced and rich, but if you’re using the notebook for multimedia, you’ll want to spring for desktop speakers to get more volume.
At least you won’t have to worry about hard drive space – our review model, which is the top-of-the-range A300, came with a massive 640GB hard drive, made up of two 320GB 5,400rpm platters. Other fittings include four USB 2.0 ports, VGA, Gigabit Ethernet, S-Video, HDMI, FireWire, ExpressCard, five-in-one memory card reader, DVD Super Multi drive, biometric fingerprint scanner, FM radio and a 1.3-megapixel webcam. On the wireless front, it includes 802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and infrared.
We tested battery life with our usual DVD run-down test, and with all the power saving features off and screen brightness set to 40%, it played our test disc for an hour and forty-five minutes – about what we’d expect for a machine with these specs. This translates to around two and a half hours of regular use with Wi-Fi turned off, and if you’re travelling, the unusually large power brick adds an extra 750g to your carry pack.