Toshiba Satellite U300-113 review

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Verdict:

Toshiba's Satellite U300-113 is compact and attractive but disappoints in some key areas. At £700, the Satellite is inexpensive for such a compact notebook. We liked its quality display and responsive keyboard, but if you travel regularly, the relatively short battery life and poor touch pad are less than ideal.

Review Date: 19 Sep 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Satellite weighs only 2kg and is stylish too, with a black and silver chassis and an attractive dark blue lid.

Although the compact keyboard means some keys, such as the left Shift and function keys, are a bit small, it is comfortable to use. The keys are responsive with plenty of feedback and are a pleasure to type on. Sadly, the small touch pad feels irritatingly jittery and isn't very accurate. The touch pad buttons are stiff and hard to press too.

We were more impressed with the U300's 13.3in screen. Areas of white looked bright with no colour cast. Other colours looked rich and evenly lit. It's not perfect, though; we noticed some coarseness in our greyscale and colour transitions tests. Still, it's one of the best notebook displays we've seen recently.

Performance

As expected, the integrated Intel graphics are unsuitable for playing the latest 3D games. The 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo T5450 is the slowest Intel processor in this group and there's only 1GB of RAM. As a result, the Satellite couldn't keep up with the other notebooks in our benchmarks, so if you need the fastest possible performance on the move, the U300 isn't for you.

A slim notebook offers little advantage over a larger, heavier one if it has a short battery life, as you're still tethered to a power socket. The U300 lasted just over three hours in our light use test, which is long enough for a short-haul flight. The MacBook lasted an hour longer though, so there's room for improvement.

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