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Review: Toshiba Satellite U500

The good

Bright screen
Textured exterior gives a sense of quality
Eco mode gives an excellent idea of exactly how much power you're using

The bad

A little hefty for its size
Battery runs short due to powerful hardware

Design

Toshiba's hero product for this quarter's release is the U500, a 13.3-inch laptop with a dark mocha texture on the lid that puts you in mind of old hardcover books. We'd like to say ultraportable, but the weight of 2.15kg makes it a little portly compared to the competition. Asus' U80V weighs the same, but gives one more inch on the screen and a slightly slimmer profile. Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro manages 2.04kg despite being wrapped in aluminium, and offers a significantly slimmer profile.

At 1280x800 the screen is bright and crisp though, and a high resolution webcam sits at the top, offering what Toshiba helpfully calls an "HD Webcam" - it's capable of video up to 1280x800. However, it's only really responsive at capturing up to 640x480 - higher than this and it just gets laggy. Nonetheless, fidelity is definitely a notch above what most PC laptops offer.

The interior continues the same faux-hard cover design, with a silver trim, silver mouse buttons and a fingerprint reader nestled between the left- and right-click. The trackpad is lit by a single white LED strip, the keyboard is backlit and touch-sensitive buttons are lit in white along the top, which make a hugely annoying beep when pressed. This beep sounds continuously and rapidly when holding the buttons down, a problem for volume adjustment, and will have you scrabbling for Toshiba's HWSetup program to turn it off, buried a few levels deep in the Start menu. You'll also need HWSetup to be able to turn the keyboard backlighting manually on and off through Fn+Z - although nothing in Toshiba's software makes this clear, leaving the user to think the feature is broken.

One of the touch-sensitive buttons is Toshiba's Eco mode: a power-saving application that switches off a bunch of options and tells you how much power you're consuming in real time, along with a monthly, weekly and daily measurement. It's a neat little application that will give you a good idea of exactly how much power each feature in the laptop is sucking. Toshiba has decided though which settings are best for you in Eco mode, not allowing the user to customise the profile.

Features

Toshiba bundles a swathe of its own software with the U500, of which a few are useful standouts - ConfigFree makes a welcome return for wireless configuration; HDMI control makes an appearance, allowing a TV that supports the feature to turn off a PC connected by HDMI; and Toshiba's PC Health Monitor allows the user to check battery charge, power consumption, battery health, CPU temperature and hard drive status at a glance.

The usual advertisements disguised as software are here - Symantec Norton Internet Security 2009 and Microsoft Office 2007 trials; Google Desktop, Earth and Toolbar; along with Picasa. A number of these add-ins also plague the Vista sidebar, and unlike every other vendor we've ever seen, Toshiba has chosen to lock it to the side, restricting the horizontal size of applications. This was quickly turned off.

On the left-hand side, a VGA and HDMI-out port, eSATA/USB combined port (supporting sleep and charge), another USB port, ExpressCard 54 slot and headphone/microphone jacks. A hot air vent is here as well, likely to warm any left hander that happens to be using an external mouse. On the right, power jack, gigabit Ethernet, modem, USB and DVD+-RW. The front lip is sparse, featuring only an SD card reader and a wireless on/off switch.

Internally, it features a Core 2 Duo P8700 CPU @ 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM and a 300GB hard drive. The 4GB, however, is effectively limited to 3.07GB as Toshiba has opted to use a 32-bit version of Windows Vista Business, incapable of registering the full amount of RAM. An ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 series does GPU duties, although we couldn't get the Catalyst Control Center to be more specific than this.

Performance

Running 3DMark06 and PCMark05 gave us scores of 4177 and 6366 respectively, this diminutive laptop punching far above its weight. Unfortunately, this also means it leans heavily on the battery, and in our worst-case scenario it lasted one hour, 26 minutes and 15 seconds with all power-saving features turned off, screen brightness and volume set to maximum and an XviD file played back. For lighter use, and particularly with Toshiba's Eco mode turned on, battery times will be considerably longer.

Toshiba's Satellite U500 wants to be portable and powerful, which has a negative impact on both the battery life and the weight. Still, if you need power in a petite package, the U500 might do it for you.

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