Toshiba Portégé M200 > Reviews (7)

Basic overview:
The portege m200 is a nifty little item. you can use it as a normal laptop but also have the ability to swivel the screen round and make it lie flat like a tablet.
it comes with a tablet pen so you can write on the screen whenever.

I will say that in this review i am going to give my opinion and what i have experienced, i am not going to list all its features, just things that i love and the not so good parts.

first of all, it is a well rounded machine, i can play call of duty 2 on it which is impressive, my 2ghz celeron desktop had problems running that.

the graphics card will not dissapoint, and the 2GHZ centrino is a blessing, i can do lots on the laptop and not experience any problems.

I was dissapointed by the fact it came with no internal drives, mine came with an external USB floppy drive but i am not sure if that was from the retailers or from toshiba. you probably wouldnt use it anyway.

i purchased an external drive case for around £20 (send me a message if you want details) and just put an internal drive into that instead of forking out for an external drive.

i have no problem with the keyboard, it is great layout, through practice toshiba have nailed it pretty well.

the battery life is impressive, toshiba have their own battery management software, you can let it do its job or tinker.
it changes amount of battery consumption compared to amount of batery left.

for example when you take out the adapter it will stop/slow down the fans and slow down the CPU.
so if you are a non intensive user it will last for quite a while but if you are a gamer you can set it to full power, battery wont last as long but you will get the full power system.

Another thing i love is a softwar app that toshiba bundles with it, 'symbol commander', when in tablet mode, or even laptop for that matter just hold down right mouse button, or the button on the pen and draw a symbol and it will run the program associated with it, cool, no?
you can designate which program you want or other stuff for it to do like maximise or minimise and close. it can type specific text for you aswell.

toshiba also bundle audio effect, a program that controls the mic direction so it cancel's out any noise from certain directions and quitens the speakers, for speach recognition that is pretty important and works well.

the most effective use for this is when you have the screen down in tablet you can hold the laptop in portrait or landscape and instead of messing about with buttons you can just draw two arrows and it will rotate the screen for you, it goes through 360 degrees so you can hold the laptop which ever way you want and make the screen the right way up.

being a tablet you expect it to have good hand writing recognition, it does.
i suffer from a medical condition and my handwriting is very poor and inconsistent, but the portege manages it beautifully, only when i try to throw it does it not work.

toshiba are so sure that they upgrade the warranty to three years for free, now that is impressive.

another feature that i love is the blutooth and infrared, most modern phones come with one or the other, i only recently upgraded my phone and was about to purchase a way to connect it to a computer but i didnt need to, it automatically does to the portege via infrared, i can send photos and files back and forward with ease.

all in all a very well rounded system, great ram coupled with CPU gives you a good efficient system, no problems for work or play.