Toshiba NB300 review

From the outside the Toshiba NB300 looks pretty much the same as the company’s NB305 netbook, although in a more sombre black case. However, flip the 10.1in screen open and the difference becomes obvious: this netbook as a traditional keyboard compared to the chiclet-style of the NB305.

Which one’s best really comes down to a matter of personal taste and how you type. The NB300 has the advantage that its keyboard has slightly larger keys as there’s no spaces between them. There’s plenty of feedback and the keys are responsive and comfortable to type on. Touch-typists may have a slight preference for this keyboard, although the NB305 remains a comfortable netbook to type on.

The large touchpad is a pleasure to use and it supports multi-touch gestures so that you can zoom, scroll and rotate in Windows 7.

There’s one other subtle difference between the two netbooks: the NB305 has Bluetooth, while the NB300 doesn’t. This isn’t likely to be a big problem unless you want to tether your netbook to your mobile phone for 3G internet access.

Fortunately, everything else remains the same. So, you get the excellent build quality and a laptop that feels as though it’s been designed to be carried around all day. This is reinforced by the absolutely stunning battery life of just over 10-and-a-half hours. In other words, you can use this netbook all day without having to plug it in.

Inside there’s a 1.66GHz Atom N450 processor, which has integrated graphics. With 1GB of memory and Windows 7 Starter edition, we got an overall score of 14 in our benchmarks, which is pretty standard for a netbook. It’s enough power to run email, office and web applications, but you’ll want a ‘real’ laptop if you want to edit video or photos.

The memory can be upgrade to 2GB through the easy-access panel underneath, although you’ll have to replace the existing 1GB stick of RAM, as there’s only a single memory slot. The 250GB hard disk should be large enough for most people’s documents and applications.

The 10.1in screen is one of the best that we’ve seen on a netbook. It’s evenly lit with excellent viewing angles and bright vibrant colours. As with the majority of other netbooks the 1,024×600 resolution is just about acceptable for light use, although some dialog boxes can drop off the bottom.

The NB300 has the same clever software as on the NB305. There’s power management software to help prolong battery life, and management software that lets you turn on power to one of the three USB ports, so that you can charge your devices when your laptop’s in sleep mode. There’s also the ReelTime software, which tracks which documents you’ve opened and when you opened them, giving you a timeline of your work. To save on system resources you can turn this off.

There’s little difference between this netbook and the NB305. The NB300 is a touch cheaper, but doesn’t have Bluetooth, but it has slightly larger keys. Unless you need Bluetooth the choice has to come down to personal preference, so this laptop also wins a Best Buy award.