Toshiba Satellite Click Mini review

The Toshiba Satellite Click Mini is the smallest hybrid laptop/tablets I’ve ever reviewed. With a screen just 8.9 inches diagonally, this is a seriously tiny device. It’s coated in matt white plastic and isn’t pretty, but it’s not offensive or cheap-looking, either.

Including the chunky bezels, the whole device measures a little over 11 inches diagonally, which leaves room for a very small keyboard. Toshiba has done its best with this, adding secondary functions to most of the keys, including F keys on the bottom two rows of letters and brightness, volume and media controls on the number keys. This mostly works fine as these keys aren’t critical to getting work done, but the one key I hate with a passion is the Delete key, which can only be pressed by hitting both the fn and backspace keys simultaneously. If you use the Delete key regularly, this will take some getting used to.

The actual experience of typing on the Click Mini is nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. It’s certainly adequate for entering data, even for those of us with larger hands. The only area where things get cramped is on the right side of the ‘board, where the punctuation keys are half-width, meaning the apostrophe, semicolon and hash keys are very tightly bunched up.

It’s easy to build up speed on this keyboard when typing normal characters, but if you make a mistake or have to do anything beyond standard letters, things slow down a bit. Still, it’s a very usable work device if you don’t want to lug a big laptop around with you. The touchpad, which is almost comically small, is sensitive and responsive and even works with multi-fingered gestures. Despite its small size, we had no problems using it, which was a pleasant surprise.

The whole device weighs just 1kg, putting it firmly in netbook territory. By itself, the tablet portion weighs 470g, which is 45g more than a similarly-sized standard tablet such as the 9in Google Nexus 9. In addition to the keyboard, the docking portion of the Click Mini includes a full-size USB2 port, an SD card reader and, most crucially, a second battery.

This second battery is definitely necessary, as even with both batteries working together I only saw 6 hours 38 minutes in our light-use battery test, which is much less than I was expecting.

You can charge the whole device via the MicroUSB port on the tablet portion. The tablet battery is charged first, and only when it reaches 100% charge does the dock’s battery start to take on power. To charge the entire device takes an absolute age, though; I waited more than four hours for the tablet and keyboard to both get to maximum charge.