Toshiba's first consumer-oriented netbook in the United States, the Toshiba mini NB205, promises to be one of the hottest netbooks for 2009. Like most of the low-cost companion PCs available in stores, the mini NB205 helps you stay connected with a simple laptop that easily fits in a purse or backpack. This netbook certainly offers a lot with a nearly full-sized keyboard and touchpad and all-day battery life, but is it the best $400 netbook on the market? Let's take a closer look.
Toshiba mini NB205 (NB205-N310/BN) Specifications:
- OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home SP3
- 10.1" WSVGA (1024 x 600) LED-backlit display
- CPU: Intel Atom N280 (1.66GHz, 533MHz FSB)
- Graphics: Intel GMA 950
- LAN onboard 10/100 Mbps Ethernet controller
- Wireless: 802.11b/g and Bluetooth V2.1
- Memory 1GB (DDR2 533MHz)
- Storage: 160GB hard drive (5400rpm) and SD/SDHC media card reader
- Webcam: 0.3 Megapixel
- Dimensions 10.4 x 8.3 x 1.0/1.27 inches (W x D x H)
- Weight 2.93lbs with 6-cell battery
- Battery: 6-cell Lithium-Ion
- Warranty: 1-Year Parts and Labor, 1-Year Battery
- Price as configured: $399.99 USD
Build and Design
The Toshiba mini NB205 is the first netbook (low-price, low-performance, ultraportable laptop) from Toshiba, but the design is certainly one of the most attractive we've seen in the netbook category. Toshiba offers the NB205 in multiple colors, but the silver and "Sable Brown" color combination in our review unit looks quite nice. The screen lid is made of thin textured plastic with the Toshiba logo front and center in silver metalic plastic. Toshiba engineers made the interesting choice of placing the power button in the middle of the screen hinge where it is exposed even when the netbook is closed. At first I was concerned this might not be the best position since it means the power button could be accidentally triggered inside a backpack or laptop case, but the button is disabled if the screen lid is closed.
Build quality was less than impressive despite the attractive exterior of the NB205. The thin plastics used in the construction of the chassis are prone to flex and the plastics make annoying "creaking" noises if you squeeze the netbook between your fingers. The full-size keyboard looks fantastic, but as soon as you apply typing pressure with your fingers you begin to feel the keyboard flex and bounce as you type. Unfortunately, the only area of the mini NB205 that feels nice and firm is the tension on the screen hinges.
The bottom of the netbook chassis shows an abundance of air vents to help with cooling (more on that later) and a pair of easy access panels for the RAM and hard drive. We're happy to see more and more netbooks with easy access to the internals for upgrading the memory or storage, and Toshiba makes it very simple to complete these upgrades after removing three screws.
Screen and Speakers
The Toshiba NB205 uses a nice and bright 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display panel with a 1024 x 600 native resolution. I wish Toshiba offered the mini NB205 with a higher resolution screen such as the ones available from Dell, HP, and Sony, but considering the $400 price point we can't complain too much. Vertical viewing angles are average, with obvious color inversion when viewing from below and some over-exposed colors when viewed from above. Horizontal viewing angles are very good with colors only starting to shift at extreme wide viewing angles.
The built-in speaker performance on the mini NB205 is acceptable for listening to system sounds or very short online video clips, but overall the speaker quality is sub-par for a netbook. The built-in speaker is located on bottom front edge and can't produce enough distortion-free volume to push sound up toward the user. If you want to use this netbook as a mobile entertainment portal then you need to invest in some good headphones. On the bright side, the audio output from the headphone jack is good when paired with earphones or a good set of external speakers.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The NB205 uses a new full-size keyboard that is quite massive for a 10-inch netbook. At first glance the NB205 looks to have one of the best keyboards on any of the current-generation netbooks. Unfortunately, that opinion quickly changes once you start typing. Although the keys are nice and large with excellent spacing to prevent typos, the keyboard falls victim to the same thin and flexible plastics used in the construction of the chassis. If you apply anything more than light typing pressure you will feel the keyboard "bouncing" under your fingertips as the plastic keyboard frame bends under the weight of your hands. If Toshiba engineers places a support frame under the keyboard this problem could easily be fixed.
On a much happier note, the mini NB205 features the single best touchpad we've used on any netbook to date. The touchpad measures roughly 3.2 inches wide by 1.8 inches tall with standard-sized touchpad buttons that go all the way to the front edge of the netbook. In short, Toshiba made perfect use of the available space and gives users a "real" touchpad rather than the half-sized touchpads used on most netbooks. The touchpad itself is an ALPS model with excellent sensitivity and only minor lag. The scroll zones required a bit of adjustment in our review unit, but once we increased the scroll speed everything seemed fine.
Input and Output Ports
The port selection on the Toshiba mini NB205 is pretty basic for a netbook. The NB205 includes three USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, Ethernet, microphone and headphone jacks, and a SD/SDHC media card slot. One extra little feature is that one of the three USB ports is a "Sleep and Charge" port. This allows you to charge a cell phone or MP3 player using the USB port even if the netbook is turned off. The only potential problem with this feature is that if you're running on battery power and forget to unplug an iPod you might end up with a dead netbook battery ... if you change the default settings.
Here is a quick tour around the NB205:
Front view: SD card slot, touchpad buttons and indicator lights.
Rear view: No ports ... just the hinges and battery.
Left side view: VGA out, heat vent, microphone and headphone jacks, Ethernet, and USB "Sleep and Charge" port.
Right side view: Two USB 2.0 ports, power jack, and security lock slot.
Performance and Benchmarks
The Toshiba mini NB205 offers similar performance to most netbooks, but that shouldn't be a surprise to most of our readers. The performance section of a netbook review is generally very boring compared to a full-featured notebook because most netbook have virtually identical specs. All Intel Atom-based netbooks have nearly identical performance in terms of actual real-world use. Overall performance with the Intel Atom platform is very reasonable for daily activities like Web browsing, email, using Microsoft Office, listening to music, and watching DVD-quality movies. If you're in a bind you can even use Photo Editing Software like Photoshop or GIMP for basic image editing.
The one and only performance-related issue that we encountered during our testing of the NB205 was related to bloatware. Toshiba decided to include some "helpful" applications for the webcam, battery monitoring, wireless controls and Norton antivirus ... all of which strain the netbook's limited resources and make the NB205 slower than it should be. While most netbooks finish booting into Windows XP (including launching all startup applications) in less than 45 seconds, the NB205 takes more than 70 seconds to finish loading all the bloatware during Windows startup.
wPrime processor comparison results (lower scores mean better performance):
| Notebook / CPU | wPrime 32M time |
| Sony VAIO TZ (Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.20GHz) | 76.240 seconds |
HP Pavilion dv2 (AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 @ 1.60GHz)
| 103.521 seconds
|
| ASUS Eee PC 1000HE (Intel Atom N280 @ 1.66GHz) | 114.749 seconds |
| Toshiba mini NB205 (Intel Atom N280 @ 1.66GHz) | 115.891 seconds |
| ASUS Eee PC 1008HA (Intel Atom N280 @ 1.66GHz) | 116.030 seconds |
| ASUS Eee PC 1005HA (Intel Atom N280 @ 1.66GHz) | 116.421 seconds |
| HP Mini 2140 with HD screen (Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60GHz) | 123.281 seconds |
Dell Latitude 2100 (Intel Atom @ 1.60GHz)
| 124.062 seconds
|
| Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom @ 1.60GHz) | 125.812 seconds
|
| Lenovo IdeaPad S10 (2009) (Intel Atom @ 1.60GHz) | 126.406 seconds |
| ASUS Eee PC T91 (Intel Atom Z520 @ 1.33GHz) | 141.031 seconds |
| Samsung NC20 (VIA Nano ULV U2250 @ 1.30GHz) | 173.968 seconds |
PCMark05 measures overall system performance (higher scores mean better performance):
| Notebook | PCMark05 Score |
| Sony VAIO TZ (1.20GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600, Intel GMA 950) | 2,446 PCMarks |
| HP Pavilion dv2 (1.60GHz AMD Athlon Neo, ATI Radeon HD 3410 512MB) | 2,191 PCMarks |
| ASUS N10 (1.60GHz Intel Atom, NVIDIA 9300M 256MB) | 1,851 PCMarks |
| Toshiba Portege R500 (1.20GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600, Intel GMA 950) | 1,839 PCMarks |
| ASUS Eee PC 1005HA (1.66GHz Intel Atom N280, Intel GMA 950) | 1,637 PCMarks |
| Dell Latitude 2100 (1.60GHz Intel Atom, Intel GMA 950) | 1,588 PCMarks |
| ASUS Eee PC 1008HA (1.66GHz Intel Atom N280, Intel GMA 950) | 1,564 PCMarks |
| Acer Aspire One (1.60GHz Intel Atom, Intel GMA 950) | 1,555 PCMarks |
| Toshiba mini NB205 (1.66GHz Intel Atom N280, Intel GMA 950) | 1,538 PCMarks |
| ASUS Eee PC 1000HE (1.66GHz Intel Atom N280, Intel GMA 950) | 1,535 PCMarks |
| Samsung NC20 (1.30GHz VIA Nano ULV U2250, VIA Chrome9 HC3) | 1,441 PCMarks |
| HP Mini 2140 with HD screen (1.60GHz Intel Atom, Intel GMA 950) | 1,437 PCMarks |
| ASUS Eee PC T91 (1.33GHz Intel Atom, Intel GMA 950) | 1,292 PCMarks |
The use of Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics is probably the only major limitation for netbooks. This integrated graphics processor (IGP) is powerful enough to handle displaying a PowerPoint presentation on a projector or watching DVD quality movies, but if 1080p video playback or video editing is your primary concern then you'll want to look elsewhere. We selected a family-friendly movie trailer and downloaded three different versions in 480p, 720p, and 1080p resolutions. We used the CCCP Codec Pack for decoding and Media Player Classic Homecinema (version 1.1.796.0) for playing all of the video files.
Video Playback Performance:
| Video Resolution | CPU Usage | Playback Comments |
| 480p | 25%-35% (hyperthreading)
| Plays flawlessly |
| 720p | 45%-50% (hyperthreading)
| Plays flawlessly
|
| 1080p | 55%-70% (hyperthreading)
| Plays with severe stutter, dropped frames and audio out of sync
|
HDTune for the hard drive performance:
Heat and Noise
External temperatures on the NB205 are what I consider to be "lap friendly" over most of the netbook's surface. The areas near the GPU, RAM, hard drive, and Wi-Fi card showed up as obvious heat spikes, but nothing that was too hot to handle. Temperature readings taken from the outside of the plastic chassis remained mostly in the 80s and 90s.
Below are images indicating the temperature readings (listed in degrees Fahrenheit) taken inside our office where the ambient temperature was 74 degrees Fahrenheit.
The cooling fan inside the mini NB205 is louder than we like to hear from a netbook. Whenever the CPU is under stress (such as when watching a YouTube video) the cooling fan kicks on and sounds like a weak hair dryer. It's loud enough to be moderately annoying in a quiet classroom or office. Considering the abundant air vents built into the NB205, I'm a little surprised the cooling fan has to work so hard.
Battery
The 6-cell lithium-ion battery included with the NB205 has a 5800 mAh rating and delivers excellent battery life for a netbook. Toshiba promises 9 hours of battery life, but we never managed to get quite that much out of a fully charged battery. In our test with the screen brightness set to 70%, wireless active, and XP set to the laptop/portable power profile the system stayed on for 7 hours and 38 minutes of constant use. This isn't as high as some of the latest Asus Eee PC netbooks, but the Toshiba NB205 should have more than enough juice to get you through a full day of web browsing and email.
Conclusion
The new Toshiba mini NB205 is an attractive netbook that offers a fantastic touchpad, large keyboard, and easy access for upgrades. The battery life of the NB205 is among the best in class and should get you through a full day at school or the office. At a price of just $400 this might be a popular netbook for the back-to-school season.
Still, despite these nice features, it's hard to overlook the flex and sound of weak plastics, the extremely flexible keyboard, and the weak speakers. Most netbooks have surprisingly firm keyboards, so we're more than a little disappointed that the keyboard on the NB205 practically "bounces" while you type on it. Most netbooks don't have particularly great speakers, but listening to music or online videos wasn't fun on the NB205. If you're looking for a good netbook for $400 or less the Toshiba mini NB205 deserves a close look, but there are many alternatives to consider in this price range.
Pros:
- Easy access for upgrades
- Large touchpad
- Good battery life
Cons:
- Weak plastic construction
- Severe keyboard flex
- Unimpressive speakers
Source : notebookreview.com
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