So, remember that itch I had for a new gadget? Well, I scratched it last night, and now welcome the Toshiba NB205 to my gadget repository. After reading Kevin Tofel's posts on JKontheRun and seeing his twitters about it, I decided to take the plunge and go for it. Some early impressions:
- Its actually a pretty good looking and well designed device. The Mocha Brown colour that I purchased is pretty elegant and doesn't clash with the silver, while the contrasting matte and glossy/shiny textures give the device a high quality feel. I don't know about the huge bezel though, it adds some unnecessary bulk to the device.
- Toshiba needs to EASE UP on the bloatware. An hour of work at it, and its still running 55 processes at start-up. By comparison, my old HP Mini 1000 had something like 40, including an IM client and skype.
- The touchpad is HUUUUUGE. Kevin's pictures noted it as big, especially compared to other netbooks, but this has a far larger touchpad than my real laptop, the 13" Asus W7S. It's even bigger than my 14" Asus W3J! Now we know why the bezel is so large.
- Good old Atom...I don't remember it being this slow, and this Toshiba has the faster N280 processor with a much faster hard disk. Maybe its the 60 processes killing system resources.
- The keyboard, in typical Toshiba fashion, is woeful. If I return this, it will be because of the keyboard. The keys themselves look and feel like the metal dialer keys on pay-phones, which is kinda charming...for about 30 seconds, until you start typing. Then it starts bugging you. And then you notice that, unlike the aforementioned phone booth keypads, these keys have flex! And the layout is bugging me, with the useless tilde key moved from the number row to next to the spacebar. Not only does this make the keyboard smaller, it messes up the alignment of the numbers. Good job, Toshiba. /end rant
- I really like the new Intel palmrest stickers...shiiiiny
- 7+ hours of battery life, I'm at 63% and 4 hours 32 minutes to go. Nearly full brightness, on the Toshiba power profile, just web-surfing and blogging. We'll see, it looks pretty good. The battery sticking out the back does not bother me.
- My first chance to use XPize - its pretty sweet, not gonna lie. Makes XP feel modern again, so its kind of like a lighter and more friendly version of Vista Basic. Hmm, maybe XPize is the one that's slowing the system down so much...
- If I keep it, I'm going to install 7 RTM. We'll see. The more I type, the more I hate the keyboard, and honestly, the mousepad can't make up for it.
- Even turning off power management doesn't help with the keyboard lag when typing in the Typepad editor. Hmm, Atom wasn't this slow even under Win7...The only things I have running are Firefox, Skype, Battery Bar, and the 22 different Toshiba utilities that won't go away.
- The laptop stays pretty cool when just doing basic tasks, so the fans almost never run. This makes for nearly silent operation.
- I feel like the open SD card slot is going to collect a lot of dust.
- Sleep and charge feature sounds like a really good idea. I'll see how well it works in a little bit.
- I'm seeing a lot of reviews saying the speakers are terrible, and the few times I've heard them do nothing to disprove that notion, but until I get some Linkin Park onto here, I can't be certain.
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