Toshiba libretto W105-L251 Review
There are many buzz for the high-concept Toshiba Libretto W100 since it first announced in June 2010. These dual-touchscreen mini laptop like the Toshiba Libretto W105-L521 is built around a limited version showpiece by Toshiba, to celebrate the companies 25th anniversary in the Mobile Computing Business, and is certainly an experiment that pushes the boundaries between laptops, tablets and portable media players .
Despite the far-out thinking behind it, and the components to be weak, the libretto W100 worked in practice much better than we expected in some areas, including certain types of media playback and general Web browsing. This was particularly surprising because the system is running Windows 7 Home Premium on two displays simultaneously, all from a 1.2 GHz Intel Pentium U5400 CPU and 2GB RAM. Our configuration (currently only available for Toshiba’s website) is called the W105-L251 and sold for $ 1,099.
Looking a bit like a giant Nintendo DS, the libretto two 7-inch multi-touch displays, with the second expected to replace the traditional keyboard you would find in this kind of clamshell design. By tapping a key on the side of the chassis, a virtual keyboard (similar to what you find on an iPhone or IPAD) appears on the bottom of the screen to fill. Tap the same button twice, and have instead received a virtual screen touchpad.
Our first fight was with figuring out how to juggle these two virtual input devices, such as the bottom screen is not big enough for both the keyboard and the touchpad completely at once (and display, in our tests on-screen keyboard and touchpad were not registered are inputs simultaneously). Eventually we came to a nice rhythm of the single-and double-tap of keyboard pad switch to on the fly to touch, even though it is a little catchy.
BUY TOSHIBA LIBRETTO W105-L251 NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
Press the button on the right side of the lower display changes between the default Windows desktop OS and a number of proprietary Bulletin Board Toshiba screens that allow you to organize photos and make notes on a touch-friendly surface. It looks smart, but we can not say that it is particularly useful, especially since it (like almost any proprietary app) has its own learning curve.
In fact, navigating the Windows interface was mostly lag-free, something which can not be said for many netbooks. At the same time, a 7-inch touch screen, no matter how many aids to navigation tricks that you are, just not ideal for touch, and we spent much time hunting and pecking, tries center of the small cursor on buttons and tabs.
One of the most essential navigation shortcuts called the Easy Menu Utility. Behind this generic name is a screen overlay that, when the title bar of a window is displayed tapped. A nine-square grid superimposed on the screen and gives you great tap-friendly buttons for the maximization and minimization of the active window, toggle the window on the other display, stretching or even the active window to cover on both displays. It is handy, but having to hide what you are in an overlay behind us, even for a few seconds, suggests that some form of gesture control could be useful.
Unlike Apple’s IPAD, do not you simply use your finger to scroll, you can flick through websites or documents was frustrating and working conditions of tiny buttons and tabs, even if the on-screen touch pad instead of a finger. That is, the touch controls on the libretto are easily among the most we respond to a Windows-based Tablet’ve encountered. not unlike some of the other WinOS pills we have tried, you will spend most of their time staring at the spinning wait Windows icon, and we would compare to the overall experience to a decent Intel Atom Netbook.
BUY TOSHIBA LIBRETTO W105-L251 NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
Video playback of 720p local video files was flawless, but online streaming video was difficult. On YouTube, 480p videos play smoothly, while those who stuttered 720p. On Hulu 480p video was choppy, but the lower-res options worked well, and still looked decent on the small 7-inch 1024 x600 pixel screen. Gaming, as one might imagine, is largely worked out of the question, although the few games we tried Facebook and smoothly animated. The Utility Easy Menu is an easy on-screen overlay for touch control.
Ports and connectivity options are limited predictable, but not more than we saw at the other UMPC systems. There is a single USB port (for plugging in an external mouse handy in a pinch) and a microSD slot, and a basic webcam sits next to the top of the screen. It is no Ethernet jack, but you get 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Despite the promise of a 62GB solid-state drive, the libretto W100 is surprisingly loud. An internal fan kicks in often sounding as loud as a spinning platter based hard drive. Despite the hard-working fan, the system gets very hot, especially around the vents in the top half, and while much of the heat conductive metal top cover.
Although it certainly does not compete against the full-size notebooks in raw performance, the system is capable of basic Windows tasks run was impressive (given our initial low expectations). For a largely experimental showpiece that Toshiba was not said for large-scale consumption, provides the libretto W100 on a large part of his promises, and – more importantly – to use often fun. At the end of the day, as the high price and limited availability, this is really more of an executive toy than anything else, especially since they do not fully replace any other gadget in your tech arsenal.
BUY TOSHIBA LIBRETTO W105-L251 NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
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