Toshiba Satellite E305 (S1990) review

Now in its third year, Best Buy’s Blue Label program is something of a time capsule for fickle consumer tastes. Being the behemoth that it’s, the retail giant hands PC makers a wishlist of specs, design flourishes, and aggressive price points — all with the promise of promoting the completed product exclusively. The 14-inch Toshiba Satellite E305 has had a variety of facelifts since we reviewed the E205 last year, and reminds us that these days, shoppers prefer metal to glossy plastic, and seamless touchpads to massive mouse buttons. The E305′s got all that, together with a Sandy Bridge processor, USB 3.0, a Blu-ray drive, a 4G radio, and the second one generation of Intel’s Wireless Display technology. For $899, that every one sounds dandy, but as we all know, a laptop doesn’t always equal the sum of its parts. Is it as much of a steal as you’d imagine it to be? Head on past the break and spot for yourself.

Feel and look

In its third collaboration with Best Buy, Toshiba scrapped almost everything that made last year’s E205 distinctive – the oversized touch buttons, extended hinge, and, yes, its glossy, Smurf blue finish. But something hasn’t changed: it’s clear Toshiba and Best Buy still want their budget creation to appear costlier than its $900 price ticket.

They almost succeeded. The aluminum lid makes a striking first impression, as do the matching chassis and chrome accents. Meanwhile, the etched checkered patten makes the design seem richer and has the additional benefit of repelling fingerprints, though it also creates the optical illusion that the chassis is thicker than it’s. And while the “champagne” color isn’t so aptly named — it is a cooler, silvery shade in all however the dimmest light — we predict it is a good match for the textured metal surfaces. The general effect is modern, though we wouldn’t go as far as to name it futuristic. Most of all, we’re pleased that Toshiba tucked its all-caps logo in a corner of the lid, in place of emblazoning it front-and-center as it’s wont to do.

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And yet, in the event you lift the lid the notebook suddenly looks less refined. We stared down this laptop for a very long time, seeking to put our finger on what made us have a metamorphosis of heart. Then it came to us: the obvious, slightly shiny keys make for an incongruous match for the metal-clad body. The keyboard’s backlighting helps distract from its plasticy finish, nevertheless it only kicks in if you are in a dim room or touch the keyboard. Likewise, the touchpad has a difficult, plastic feel though it does mirror the chassis’ checkered pattern. All here’s hardly a deal-breaker, for sure, especially when we’re talking a couple of $900 system. It just seems to us that if Toshiba and Best Buy were going to move elegant in this one, they need to have gone whole hog.

We’re told that Best Buy insisted the E305 weigh not up to five pounds, and it is available in just below the limit at 4.95 pounds. That is not bad, considering the fact that a metal-clad 13-inch notebook could easily top five, although what the E305 shed in pounds it’s kept in girth – at 1.2 inches thick, it’s still at the chunky side. At the bright side, though, it feels sturdy inside the hand, due to that rock-solid aluminum body. And as the battery sits flush with the system, there are not any bulges at the bottom, which makes it easy to slide under your arm while walking. And if for some reason the sturdiness doesn’t delay, it comes with a comparatively long two-year warranty (not including accidental damage / klutz protection, in fact).

The E305 offers a healthy collection of ports, including three USB 2.0 ports, which include a USB 3.0 port that’s also home to Toshiba’s sleep-and-charge technology, which lets you charge USB-powered gadgets even if the notebook is asleep. Similarly, the headphone jack will charge a music player even though the laptop isn’t powered on and entirely awake. Besides those, the E305′s got HDMI and VGA output, a mic jack, an Ethernet port, and a memory card reader.

Keyboard and touchpad

We cannot mince words: the E305′s chiclet keyboard is supremely comfortable. Up to we kvetch about how the keyboard looks chintzy, it’s well spaced, with amply sized left and right Shift buttons. Typically, it takes us an afternoon or two to warm as much as a brand new keyboard, but this time we barely had a learning curve, and were typing 94 words per minute (an amazing score for us) not long after unboxing the laptop. What’s more, the panel felt sturdy through some bouts of furious typing, or even with our pounding the keys barely made any noise.

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Unfortunately, we won’t say an analogous concerning the trackpad. For the primary time, Toshiba opted for a clickable pad — an idea that’s apparently easier to mimic than successfully pull off. The touch area is split into left and right click zones, with a neat line to make it obvious where your finger must be. The issue is, it constantly registered right clicks, even if our finger was planted firmly at the left side. And as the buttons are narrow, it is simple on your finger to land on a too-high spot where clicks don’t register in any respect. After a few week of testing, we had more success, but really, it is not an excellent sign when a successful left click is sufficient to make you’re feeling like you’ve won.

The trackpad is unquestionably spacious enough for multi-touch gestures, and in addition features a narrow, invisible strip at the right edge for single-finger scrolling. We need to give credit where it’s due: given each of the hassle we suddenly met just looking to left click, gestures felt surprisingly smooth, and worked reliably.

Screen

The 14-inch uses Toshiba’s TruBrite technology, meaning, marketing speak aside, that it is one glossy panel. Considering that, we were pleasantly surprised at how well we were ready to follow a film while watching from odd angles. We had no problem making out the action from the far left and right sides, though we had a little bit more difficulty watching a film head-on with the screen dipped forward — the more we lowered the screen, the more washed out the colours appeared.

The 220-nit display was bright enough for us to comfortably work and watch movies for long stretches, though splurge and you will find similarly sized notebooks with more eye-popping screens, consisting of the 2 Samsung Series 9 2 . And although the E305 has a Blu-ray player, you may be limited in how much you may enjoy those high-def movies, because the screen has a run-of-the-mill 1366 x 768 resolution. That said, Blu-ray movies looked crisp and played smoothly at full screen with faithful color reproduction.

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The E305 is endowed with Dolby technology, and never the Harman Kardon audio you will find in Toshiba’s high-end Qosmio systems. You are not going to listen to any pounding bass notes here, but we’ve also heard far tinnier speakers in our day. As for the amount, the speakers were loud enough that lets still hear The Doors and The White Stripes from across our apartment, and over the sound of our noisy printer and Joan Rivers dissecting the royal wedding on TV (yes, really). Briefly, the speakers may be powerful enough if you end up hanging out alone or with a couple of friends, but you might want to fall back on external speakers the subsequent time you opt to host a rager.

The E305′s webcam stops short at VGA resolution. Though that’s fine for video chats, a good amount of detail gets lost in still photos. And although the lighting in our pictures and clips looked natural, the colours took on a rather bluish tint. The excellent news is that organising the webcam for facial recognition — a process that requires you to align your face with an onscreen avatar’s — took all of 30 seconds, and the notebook recognized us instantly after we later used it to log into our system.

Intel Wireless Display 2.0

We’re happy to report that WiDi is as easy to establish as always. The notebook comes bundled with a small adapter made by Netgear ($100 by itself) that you simply plug into the wall with an AC adapter after which connect with your monitor or HDTV using an included HDMI cable. Press the ability button within the back after which push the Wireless Display launch button at the E305′s keyboard deck (that is the one at the far right). When you press the launch button, you can notice a pause of as much as 10 seconds while your laptop finds the adapter. When it does, you will need to manually select the adapter you desire (if you bought more at $100 a pop to exploit with other TVs at your residence). That’s odd, seeing that laptops can automatically connect with familiar wireless networks. As a consequence, though, you will always manually select the adapter.

Played at full screen, 1080p video lagged ever so slightly, but we ultimately didn’t find that minor slowdown distracting. We do suggest keeping your notebook out of sight — as you’ll find within the photo below, the laptop is often one step ahead, and the video doesn’t align perfectly with what’s playing on TV.

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Because it seems, in the course of the writing of this review, Intel 5 started 5 supporting DRM-protected DVDs, Blu-rays, and a few online content via a free driver update. Unfortunately, though, that upgrade’s only available for laptops with Sandy Bridge processors (like this one), which only started shipping this spring. That will not make a difference to people taking into account buying this laptop or the same one, nonetheless it must be a bummer for readers stuck with last year’s Wireless Display technology.

Performance and Graphics

This may not surprise you, but E305, like other notebooks refreshed this year, graduates to an Intel Sandy Bridge processor — a 2.3 GHz Core i5-2410M CPU, to be exact. Moreover, the notebook runs Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) and is derived with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB 7,200RPM drive. As for the HDD, it employs hybrid drive technology, which mixes traditional harddrive storage with 4GB of flash memory that’s used to recollect accepted documents and applications — in theory making them quicker to load. During per week of testing, the E305 was ready to stay alongside of us while we ran Tweetdeck at full screen and used Chrome for email, Facebook, online banking, YouTube, and maintaining with various blogs. All this while running a whole system scan using Norton Internet Security, mind you. In brief, the performance was brisk, though frankly, it’s hard to completely appreciate a laptop’s power when a wonky touchpad makes even essentially the most rote tasks feel painstaking.

As for graphics, the E305 has Intel’s integrated HD graphics — a staple among low- and mid-range laptops. Its score of four,547 inside the gaming benchmark 3DMark falls thousands of points wanting what you’d get from a discrete card, however still trumps a number of the scores we have seen from similarly sized machines with integrated graphics. In real-world terms, that’s just fine for basic photo editing and playing simpler, not-too-graphically-intensive games.

Rounding out the E305′s list of specs is an Atheros wireless-N radio and… 6 WiMAX 6 support! Not something you usually find in a mid-range consumer laptop, eh? Though Toshiba is shy about saying just who its partner is, you’re going to get your answer simply by poking across the menus — it runs on Clearwire’s network, obviously, under Sprint’s brand. You could activate the service in Best Buy, however the notebook also comes with a utility from that you would be able to subscribe through Best Buy. In the event you all you wish is a day’s worth of connectivity, you are able to snag an afternoon pass for $10, but it’s also possible to subscribe to a month to month plan or a two-year contract. Either way, those options both pop out to $45 a month in data fees.

Battery Life and warmth

Toshiba rates the E305′s six-cell battery for as much as seven hours and ten minutes of battery life. In our own test, which involves playing an analogous video at 65 percent brightness with WiFi on, we eked out five hours and 7 minutes. Throughout, the laptop’s temperatures stayed relatively cool. After playing a Blu-ray movie for awhile and running a deadly disease scan, the fan whirred loudly, and the vent at the right side became warm — though not hot — to touch. The best side of the palm rest inched up a couple of degrees, too, while the left side (the only farther way from the vent) stayed downright chilly, as a result of that aluminum finish.

Software

The E305 comes with its fair proportion of bundled software you didn’t ask for, much of Toshiba-branded utilities, which include a computer health monitor and proprietary media player. Our one complaint is that the launch pad for the webcam software sits at the fringe of the desktop and flaps out in case you roll over it, which regularly got in our way. As for third-party software, though our review unit came with Norton Internet Security installed, those of you who pick one up through Best Buy gets a complementary one-year subscription to Kaspersky Anti-Virus software (let alone, 90 days of Geek Squad support). To not excluded, Best Buy bundled some software of its own, including that WiMAX connection utility we told you about and an app store that leads you to an area where you could spend additional cash download various software to your spankin’ new PC.

Wrap-up

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This post is tagged: aggressive price, budget creation, champagne color, display technology, optical illusion, toshiba satellite