Toshiba Satellite Radius 15 review

The Toshiba Satellite Radius 15 is certainly an interesting take on the convertible laptop formula. It’s a brushed aluminium beauty with all the practical features you could want from a work laptop, but it also has a 180-degree hinge that lets you turn it into a giant 15.6in tablet. It seems to be attempting to appeal to home users and business users at the same time, and you’ll pay £750 for the privilege.

If you’re going to overspend on a large convertible laptop, though, it might as well be this one. The laptop is mainly made from brushed aluminium, and there’s a black plastic rim around the edge of the keyboard tray and a rugged-feeling textured material around the hinge. Even the power button looks well designed, protruding slightly from the right-hand side of the chassis with its classy soft illumination effect.

You’ll find all the standard ports and connectors around the edge of the fairly svelte 20mm-thick chassis, although alongside the three USB ports (including two USB3 connectors), HDMI port and SD card reader, there’s no gigabit Ethernet port, which business users may miss. You’ll have to buy a USB adapter if you want to connect the laptop to a wired network.

The laptop’s keyboard is impressive. The keys are made from a grippy, black material, with high-contrast lettering and a bright backlight. It’s great for working in low-light conditions, but each key is also perfectly visible in daylight. It’s easy to type quickly, as the keys have excellent feedback and a very quiet action. The touchpad, meanwhile, is responsive with a high-quality click from its buttons and reliable gesture controls, including pinch-to-zoom and two-fingered scrolling.

There are some decent, if not especially exciting components inside the Satellite Radius 15. It matches the HP Envy x360 spec-for-spec with a 2.2GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-5200U, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk. It doesn’t quite match it in terms of performance, with a slightly lower overall score of 30 in Expert Reviews’ benchmarks.

This is intriguing, and points towards the chip throttling back during more intensive bouts of multitasking in order to manage heat build-up. Everyday performance in Windows 10 is fine, though, with generally snappy application performance and browsing media-heavy websites for the most part free of stuttering.

Also, although it might not match its HP rival for performance, the Satellite Radius 15 absolutely trounces it in the battery stakes, managing an impressive 6h 12m in Expert Reviews’ moderate usage test, well ahead of the HP’s 4h 52m.