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London, Dec 22 (PRINTWORDS NEWS) -A few years back the consumer electronics giants were engaged in a format selection war. To be more specific they were busy choosing the successor to DVD. It was a long drawn battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Toshiba was among the companies that pitched in for HD DVD while Sony and some others fought for Blu-Ray. In the end Blu-Ray won and the proponents of HD-DVD had to backtrack. It seems that Toshiba, a leading supporter of HD-DVD has swallowed its pride and decided to join the Blu-Ray enabled devices bandwagon. The Satellite P500 is its latest offering to the desktop replacement laptop segment and this model offers Blu-Ray drive as an optional choice. The Satellite P500-12F is available for £1,000.
It is a massive laptop that is not meant for on the move computing. However, the 4.4 kg weight seems reasonable when you look at its big 18.4 inch screen. The Blu-Ray drive is capable of recording and rewriting files including movies. This will be appreciated by the media buffs. However, it is not clear why Toshiba chose to use an awkward 1,680×945 resolution on this laptop when smaller sized laptops offer Full HD resolution. Besides, Blu- Ray movies are best enjoyed in 1920×1080 resolution, and using a lower resolution is somewhat like a deal breaker. However, the integrated Harman Kardon speakers offer superior audio quality and unless you are very finicky about sound, you won’t need external speaker set with this laptop.
Toshiba has tried to make up for the absence of Full HD resolution by offering a HDMI port. So you can hook it up to larger LCD or Plasma displays if you desire. While the laptop does not have a remote controller like some of the HP’s media centric laptops it does offer backlit media control keys. Those who need to transfer lots of data and hate waiting will be pleased to know that the P500-12F has an eSATA port and FireWire port.
It is odd to see that such a large sized laptop has a cramped keypad that makes typing for long hours cumbersome. Even entry level laptops offer well laid out keypads these days. However, in terms of pure processing power, the laptop does not disappoint. Its Intel C2D P8700 processor is speedy enough to do media encoding and working with Cad/Cam applications is easier with it. The fast CPU is ably complemented by 4GB of DDR2 RAM. This is a good combination but it would have been better had Toshiba used newer DDR3 RAM. Some of the latest Lenovo Ideapad models use DDR3 RAM. The 500GB hard disk is ideal for storing your movie and songs collection. Those who want to play the latest 3D games will be satisfied with the graphics performance of its Nvidia GeForce GT 230M GPU. This is not a gaming laptop as such but still offers reasonably good gaming performance.
Overall, the Toshiba Satellite P500 has its limitations but they are not enough to deter serious minded multimedia users. Its lack of FullHD resolution is a downer but the inclusion of faster interfaces like eSATA, powerful CPU and superior graphics make it ideal for the users looking for a multimedia powerhouse.
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I’ve read every review on this product on Amazon before I made the decision. I don’t want to list pros/cons here again. Just want to tell my experience.
This little baby is everything I want. Very fast, super quiet. I don’t want a big laptop anymore. I want to tell my manager “Save your two thousand dollars, all I want is a netook, a samsung netook”. My intended use of the netbook is for leisure activities, youtube, slingmedia, email, web surfing, and maybe(A remote distant maybe) some light office duty. Basically, a computer to distract me when I visit the bathroom.
So far, I’ve installed and tried:
1. Google two finger scroll software and followed someone’s online instruction which disables a whole bunch features of the finger pad. After that, it’s natural, intuitive and with plenty room.
2. Mounted my desktop DVD/CD drive on the home network and use it to install office 2007. Everything works great, lightening fast.
3. Installed google pack, pctool doc and Norton are the things I want. I tried google earth. The motion and graph is nice and smooth.
4. Installed sling player. how nice it is to play video on this baby, smooth and crystal clear.
5. I’m very afraid of the blue blotch issue. So the first thing I tried is to download a screen test program. Tried everything there. The screen is nice, bright and defect free. Beautiful.
6. When I started initializing the machine, I zeroed out D drive and left everything for C. Who cares about backup and restore on this machine. This is my bathroom machine. If it’s gone bad, I’ll just install everything again.
7. Someone here complained the network connection. In my try-out, I got excellent connection. The wifi network wizard picks more networks in the neighborhood than my laptop and desktop(Installed PCI wifi g card).
8. Watching netflix instantly play, youtube, hulu, etc, excellent experience.
9. I thought the speaker might be weak as someone mentioned. But I guess that person is deaf or at least hearing damaged. Plenty volume for me.
10. After installed everything, I replaced the 1GB dimm with 2GB. I have to say honestly that I didn’t notice any speedup. If you don’t want to spend the extra 20 dollars, you might just as well save it, in my opinion.
11. The keyboard is plenty big. My typing is adjusted right away. Great.
12. This is a very well engineered machine. solid, quiet and engineers pay attention to details.
In all, this netbook is a natural for me. No single one thing uncomfortable to use.
Netbook is the future!!!