Toshiba’s Atom N450 Netbook
Toshiba have slotted out a press release touting their first intel Atom N450 powered netbook: The Toshiba Mini NB305.
Among words like ‘Versatile’, ‘Diminutive’ and ‘Pioneering’ they managed to give away the spec:
- 10.1” TFT
- 11-hour battery life with the 6-cell version (impressive!)
- 1.33kg weight
- 3x USB
- 250GB hard drive
- 802.11n wireless / Bluetooth 2.1 (with enhanced data rate)
- Choice of Windows 7 Starter or XP Home
- The all important Intel Atom N450 processor (1.66GHz / 667MHz)
Seriously though, this thing actually sounds great. While not always the most beautiful machines on earth (as evidenced by them offering the NB305 netbook in ‘Mocha Brown’), Toshiba’s laptops have always been really sturdy and performed very well.
The Good Bits
The 250GB hard drive is nice (remember just a couple of years ago when full-fledged performance laptops would ship with 40GB drives?).
The USB ports offer a nice touch: one of them features ‘Sleep-and-Charge’, which is such a sensible idea we don’t know why it’s not featured in every netbook. Basically it lets you charge your phone/ipod/camera/whatever via USB even when the laptop is turned off. Simple and really useful.
The 11-hour battery life is great. We’re betting that will drop to 8 or 9 in actual use, but who’s complaining at those?
And, Toshiba’s name for reliability is great if you’re wanting a netbook to throw in your bag & haul around everywhere.
The Odd Bits
Sadly missing from Toshiba’s press release were any details of the RAM in this thing. Intel used to insist netbooks feature no more than 1GB RAM. A few manufacturers have been putting out 2GB machines lately, but we were interested to see what Toshiba would do with this (their first machine with the latest generation Intel processor).
We already touched on the colours. This thing comes in ‘Snow White’, ‘Mocha Brown’ and ‘Cosmic Black’, all of which sound a little second-rate blaxploitation-era drug dealers. We’re still holding out for the day laptop manufacturers bow to the needs and wants of the common man, and start putting out colourways like ‘Gingerbread Man Orange’, ‘Jimmy White’ and ‘Hearing Aid Beige’.
The Best Bit
Of course, the battery life is helped a lot by the Atom 450 processor inside this thing. Intel’s Atom CPU basically ate the whole netbook market alive, and the next generation of these things gives the Toshiba NB305 a headstart over a lot of similar netbooks.
