Toshiba NB505-N508TQ 10.1-Inch Netbook Review
Recently, we brought you a review of the 10 best 10-inch netbooks, and number two on the list was the Toshiba NB305-N440BL. Now, we welcome a contender to the market that has, quite frankly, blown our top 10 out of the water, and once again, it has been delivered by the Japanese technology powerhouse, Toshiba. The catchily-named NB505-N508TQ comes with a range of upgrades and improvements that ensure its highly impressive predecessor is left in the dust.
Toshiba NB505-N508TQ
Firstly, netbook users who opt to spend some of their hard-earned cash on the brand new Toshiba can choose from a range of colours that includes blue, lime green, brown, orange and turquoise. The colourful, textured top feels sturdy and solid, and the turquoise edition adorns the majority of the examples featured in Toshiba’s adverts for this sleek, slim netbook. This companion PC is wonderfully lightweight and compact, tipping the scales at 2.9lb and fitting comfortably into a purse or small bag. The new Toshiba really is a device that you’ll want to take everywhere with you, and its design makes carrying it around a joy.
You’ll also experience around 8.21 hours of battery life while using the netbook, making it an ideal companion for commuters on long journeys and business people who can’t afford for their netbook battery to let them down in the middle of a meeting.
Lift the lid on the new Toshiba and you’ll get an eyeful of the 10.1-inch LED backlit widescreen display, with a 1024×600 pixel resolution that achieves richer colours and clearer definition than its predecessor.
You’ll also notice that the Toshiba benefits from a comfortable, full-size keyboard and a full-size touchpad with multi-touch capabilities. You’ll forget that you’re not using your laptop or your home PC as you gaze into the crystal clear display, hands moving freely around the expansive keyboard.
The software package makes the Toshiba NB505-N508TQ one of the best netbook deals out there in 2011, with the critically acclaimed Windows 7 Starter 32-bit included as standard to ensure simple navigation of the netbook’s superb features.
That crystal clear display we mentioned earlier is aided by an integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator and a 3150 video processor with up to 250 MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory. In layman’s terms, all that means is that whether you’re viewing photographs, watching films or simply surfing the net, your brand new 10.1 inch screen couldn’t look any better.
To power this little beauty, Toshiba have cranked up the spec of their flagship netbook a good few notches. A 1.66 GHz Atom 455 processor with 512KB of L2 cache and 667 MHz FSB ensure that you’re never left waiting around for your netbook to load programmes or web pages – it’s lightning fast. A gigabyte of DDR2 RAM should be more than enough for most users’ needs, but should you really need to put the Toshiba through its paces, you can expand the RAM to 2GB.
As for storage space, you could pretty much pack your pet blue whale into this thing, what with it having a 250 GB SATA hard drive that performs at 5400 RPM.
The extras are what you’d expect from a best-in-class netbook; a built-in monaural speaker that produces quite a racket for such a small device, a stereo headphone jack for those long plane journeys, and a mono microphone jack for those long-distance Skype calls. The Toshiba also comes with an SD memory card reader, compatible with Secure Digital High Capacity.
The new Toshiba netbook is but a small thing, so you could be forgiven for letting it slip through your fingers. Should you have the misfortune to drop or damage it, the device is covered by a one-year warranty on parts and labour, and a separate one-year warranty on its battery.
Optional extras include a Toshiba USB portable DVD SuperMulti Drive, and you can expect to pay between $270 and $280(check out the current price!), depending on where you look for your netbook deals.
