[SC.LUG] [Fwd: [Lancaster] Review: Toshiba NB100]

[Richard Smedley]

Forwarded FYI

It's good to see an Ubuntu machine on the high street :)

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Ken Walton <ken.walton at carandol.net>
Reply-to: ken.walton at carandol.net
To: Lancaster LUG <lancaster at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Subject: [Lancaster] Review: Toshiba NB100
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:52:46 +0100

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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