Toshiba Satellite P855-307 review

The Satellite P855 is a good-looking laptop. Built from a combination of plastic and metal alloys, it’s much easier on the eye than previous Toshiba machines, especially in the fetching silver of our review sample. It’s delightfully minimal, with very few superfluous media keys or LEDS – just two buttons for power and energy saving, a Chiclet-style keyboard and oversized touchpad.

We still aren’t big fans of Toshiba’s keyboard, which has keys with little travel or tactile feedback. There’s noticeable flex in the keyboard tray, even when you press down with minimal force. A separate numeric keypad is useful for data entry, but the half-height function and arrow keys can be troublesome.

The touchpad is comfortably large enough for you to span the desktop in a single motion, although we would have preferred physical buttons to the all-in-one touchpad. To click, you have to push the whole pad inwards, which can nudge your cursor around the screen. We did appreciate the option to disable it by double-tapping in the corner, however.

Perhaps our main issue with the £1000 Satellite P855 is its mediocre screen. With a fairly average 1,366×768 resolution, the 15.6in panel isn’t as sharp or defined as other laptops we’ve seen, with poor vertical viewing angles and a glossy screen finish that made light reflections a problem. There’s a reasonable amount of screen tilt, and colours do at least look bright and vibrant, but we would have liked to have seen a few more pixels for this price.

Overall, this is a great first outing for Intel’s latest processor, reaching performance milestones that weren’t possible last year. The Satellite P855 has ample performance, in both 2D applications and 3D games, plenty of storage space and great connectivity, although it does fall down in some areas. The keyboard is pretty average and we would have liked a higher resolution screen, but if you can’t wait for the competition to announce their new laptops, this is one of the most powerful around right now.