[Lancaster] Review: Toshiba NB100

[Ken Walton]

I've just become the pleased owner of a Toshiba NB-100 netbook, with Ubuntu
Netbook Remix pre-installed, and it's a lovely little machine. I bought it
in Comet in Lancaster, in the hope of doing my little bit to make Linux more
mainstream in chain stores. I've noticed that Currys and PC World switched
to stocking netbooks with WinXP as soon as they became available, so Currys
has to be congratulated for still stocking an Ubuntu machine -- though I did
have to explain to the shop assistant that offering me a half-price deal on
Norton Anti-Virus really wasn't that good an bargain... :-)

But back to the machine. It's compact and well made (feels like it will take
a fair amount of bashing around in my rucksack) with a *very* shiny lid
(looks cool but shows fingerprints like nobody's business). Sports a 1.9GHz
Atom processor, 512Mb RAM, 80Gb hard drive, built in wifi and SD card slot
and a 8.9in 1024x600 screen which is incredibly sharp and remarkably bright
(you can actually see it outdoors on a sunny day!). The battery is supposed
to last around 3 hours, and on a quick test this afternoon, downloading a
bittorrent while reading a PDF, making notes in OpenOffice and ocassionally
looking things up in Firefox, it did 3 hours 10 minutes.

Other hardware things -- 3 USB ports, a monitor port, network cable socket,
sound input and headphone sockets, a built-in microphone and a webcam. Plus
function keys to deal with everything from sound volume to icon size. You
can even turn the fan off for those times when you're trying to sneak up on
someone. No CD/DVD drive, of course, but portable externale drives are
pretty cheap these days.

And it's fast. I think it must be the hard drive, but it's must more
responsive than my Dell Inspiron laptop running Ubuntu, and that had a 2.3
GHz CPU. OpenOffice.org loads in about 12 seconds without the Quickstarter,
and that took about 30 seconds on my old machine.

The keyboard, I like. I'm typing this with no trouble. Though I do have
small fingers, and I suspect that anyone with big fingers might find it
difficult to type on successfully. I wouldn't recommend it as a sole machine
for doing a lot of typing unless you're sure your fingers will cope. I spent
an entire summer living in a tent and typing on a Psion Revo, so I'm quite
happy with it. My only grumble is the touchpad. The mouse buttons are only
about 5mm wide, and it's very easy to accidentally touch the touch pad when
pressing a button, which makes the cursor go to places it shouldn't. But I
expect I'll get used to that. If not, I can always use an external mouse.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is lovely. It's based on Hardy Heron, but with a
redesigned interface which uses the small screen size to its fullest extent.
When you boot up, you get a three pane interface, with menu categories
(office, multimedia, internet, etc) on the left, a big pane in the middle
showing the current icons for the menu category selected, and directories in
your home folder in the right pane. The first category in the left pane is
Favourites, and programs from other categories can be put in there, so you
have everything you normally use right in front of you at startup.

There's only one toolbar on the screen, at the top. This has an Ubuntu icon
at extreme left (which takes you back to the interface) and on the right
icons for thing like battery state, wifi signal, volume control, time etc.
In the middle there are tabs for each of the programs you have loaded (just
an icon) with the program you're currently using as a large tab with title
on the toolbar instead of the usual window header bar. This saves a whole
line of text, giving you more program display space. It strikes me as a
really good example of interface design. But if you don't like it, its a
simple matter of a single click on an icon in the Preferences screen and
you're back to the default Ubuntu desktop.

Oh, and the price -- £219.99, a whole £50 less than the equivalent machine
with Windows.

I've seen some less than complementary reviews of the NB100. But they mostly
boil down to "it's not sufficiently different to other netbooks" or "it's
styling is old-fashioned" -- superficial aesthetic judgements from people
who worry too much about style. To me, it looks like a  laptop -- shiny on
the outside, workmanlike when you open it, and an interface that's a
pleasure to use. I think we're going to be friends :-)

-- 
Ken Walton
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