Toshiba Satellite Pro NB10-A-10P review

The Toshiba Satellite Pro NB10-A-10P is a cheap laptop that prioritises portability above all else. It weighs just 1.3kg meaning it could easily go into any backpack or small bag, and it’s just 21.5mm thick when closed.

he typing action is a little harsh because there’s not much travel from the keys. Some of the keys are absurdly small: the F-keys in particular are about half the size of the regular letter keys. The typing action is also made slightly less comfortable by a rather sharp edge on the wrist rest.

The touchpad is responsive and we had no problems activating multitouch gestures such as two-fingered scrolling and pinch-to-zoom. It’s very small, of course, so you’ll be constantly lifting your fingers off the pad as you drag and drop items on your desktop.

The chassis feels relatively sturdy and doesn’t have too much flex to it. The slightly textured black material it’s made from is hardly inspiring, but we suppose it’s utilitarian and will survive the occasional knock. The screen hinge is well engineered, and doesn’t wobble around even when the laptop is moved.

Around the left side of the device is a high-speed USB3 port along with a full-size HDMI port and VGA connector. You could attach a second, Full-HD monitor to the Satellite Pro NB10-A-10P, or even hook it up to a projector to give a presentation. On this side there’s also a Fast Ethernet port with a maximum speed of 100Mbit/s. It’s rare to find a Fast Ethernet port where the vast majority of the laptop market support Gigabit Ethernet, which is ten times faster. There’s also 802.11n Wi-Fi.

The 11.6in screen is a TN panel with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. It’s wide enough for most applications and web pages, and the minimum resolution we expect to see. Our tests showed it was able to cover 60.5 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is about average. This translates to more intense colours showing up several shades paler than they should, but this is acceptable for tasks that don’t rely on colour accuracy, such as watching videos and browsing the web. Viewing angles aren’t very wide, with solid colours changing shades as you move your head. You probably won’t notice this during general usage, but you’ll still want to adjust the screen position to ensure you get a better viewing experience.

Processing performance comes from the 2GHz quad-core Intel Pentium N3510 running at 2GHz. This cheap processor doesn’t excel in any particular area but, coupled to 4GB of RAM, it’s able to handle the most basic tasks you and Windows 8 will throw at it. The device never felt particularly sluggish in web browsing and video watching activities, but it’ll soon start to crawl once multiple more resource-heavy applications are launched. It achieved similar scores in all of our benchmarking tests, managing 29 in the single core-focused image rendering test. In video editing it scored 26 and managed 25 when multitasking, giving it an overall score of 26. This is around what we’d expect at this price and around what we’d recommend for anyone wanting to do the most basic tasks on a Windows 8 laptop. With anything less powerful you’ll quickly run into stuttering problems when multitasking.

Don’t even think about gaming on this machine. The integrated Intel graphics weren’t good enough to handle our Dirt Showdown test at 1,280×720 pixel resolution at a playable frame rate; it managed just 15fps. It’ll certainly handle a basic Flash game, but nothing beyond that. You’ll be able to watch HD video without any lag or stuttering, which is about as tough a challenge you can ask of a laptop like this.

As you’d expect, audio quality from the speakers is nothing to shout about; it’s not particularly loud and there’s no bass presence whatsoever. You’ll definitely want headphones or speakers if you want to fully enjoy your movies and music.

Battery life is disappointing, it only took 3h 52m to run the laptop down from a full charge to empty, which means despite its portability, you will need to take the charger with you wherever you go. The charger isn’t heavy, so this shouldn’t be too big a compromise, but it’s still short of what we’d have wanted.

The Satellite Pro-NB10-A-10P is a well-built laptop with enough power to accomplish basic work and multimedia tasks. The keyboard is exceptionally cramped, so you may want to step up to a 13in or 14in device if you have big hands, but if that doesn’t sway you, it’s a good buy.