Toshiba Satellite Pro Nb10-a-10p Laptop Review
THE TOSHIBA SATELLITE Pro NB10-A-10P is a cheap laptop that prioritises portability above all else. It weighs just 1.3kg, so it will fit easily in any backpack or small bag, and it’s just 21.5mm thick when closed. Typing on the keyboard feels a little harsh, as the keys have limited travel. Some are absurdly small, such as the F-keys, which are about half the size of the letter keys. Typing is also made slightly less comfortable by a rather sharp edge to the wrist rest. The touchpad is responsive, and we had no trouble performing multi-touch gestures such as scrolling and pinch-to-zoom. It’s very small, though, so you’ll constantly reach the edge when dragging and dropping items.
The chassis feels relatively sturdy, with little flex. Its made of a textured black material that’s hardly inspiring but is at least practical and will survive the odd knock. The screen hinge is well engineered and doesn’t wobble even when the laptop is moved.
On the left side is a high-speed USB3 port, as well as a full-size HDMI port for attaching a monitor or projector. There’s also a Fast Ethernet port with a maximum speed of 100Mbit/s. Fast Ethernet is rare in laptops these days as most offer Gigabit Ethernet, which is 10 times faster. The Satellite Pro also has 802.11n Wi-Fi.
The 11.6in screen is a TN panel with a 1,366×768 resolution. That’s the minimum resolution we expect to see, but it’s wide enough for most applications and web pages. According to our tests the screen covers 60.5 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is about average. As a result, more intense colours appear several shades paler than they should, but it’s acceptable for tasks that don’t rely on colour accuracy, such as watching videos and browsing the web. Viewing angles aren’t very wide, and solid colours change shades as you move your head. You probably won’t notice this in general use, but you’ll still want to adjust the screen position to ensure 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 with 4GB of RAM, it can handle most basic tasks. The device never felt sluggish when we used it to browse the web or watch videos, but it’ll soon start to crawl if you launch multiple resource-heavy applications. It achieved similar scores in all our tests, managing 29 in the image rendering test, which measures single-core performance. It scored 26 for video editing and 25 in the multitasking test, giving it an overall score of 26. That’s what we’d expect for the price and is the minimum for anyone who wants to do the most basic tasks in Windows 8. With anything less powerful you’ll quickly run into stuttering problems when multitasking.
Don’t even think about gaming on this laptop. The integrated Intel graphics couldn’t produce a playable frame rate in Dirt Showdown at 1,280×720, managing just 15fps. It can handle basic Flash games but nothing beyond that. You can watch HD video without any lag or stuttering, but that’s as tough a challenge as you can ask of a laptop like this. As you’d expect, audio quality from the speakers is nothing special. It’s not very loud and there’s no bass whatsoever. You’ll definitely need headphones or speakers if you want to enjoy your movies and music fully. The battery lasted a disappointing three hours and 52 minutes in our test, so despite the device’s portability, you’ll need to carry the charger with you. The charger isn’t heavy, but we’d still rather the battery lasted longer.
Toshiba’s Satellite Pro NB10-A-10P is a well-built laptop with enough power to accomplish basic work and multimedia tasks. The keyboard is cramped, so you may prefer a 13in or 14in device. For the same price, the Asus Transformer Book T200TA is a better buy.
