SPESIFIKASI Toshiba Satellite M500.
Tired of pouring over the Thin and Light notebooks for quite some time I was pretty excited toI receivw a press release on the launch of Toshiba Satellite M500. immediately emailed my friend Aji Bagjaraya, who words for PT Techking Enterprise Indonesia, the official distributor of Toshiba notebooks here.
I asked him for a hands-on review of this model, and I was very lucky. In a week, I had the black demo unit on my desktop.
I guess, almost anyone in my age bracket must have owned one or two Toshiba notebooks in the past, but it has been some time since I last played around with a Toshiba machine. That doubled the excitement.
In a way, the M500 could be considered as a semi-desktop replacement (DTR). It has a 14-inch display, which is rather small for a real DTR. Of course, if you want a larger display, Toshiba has the Qosmio X500 with a whopping 18.4-inch display and the powerful Intel Core i5 and i7 processor.
Now, going back to the M500, it is not at all a weakling, though. My demo unit came with an Intel Core i3 processor running at 2.13 gigahertz. Can you imagine? It had 2 gigabites of memory and a hard disk with a capacity of 452 gigabites. Toshiba is also very generous in throwing Windows 7 Ultimate into this machine.
I found the design a bit retro with a lot of chrome plastic trims as well as white LEDs all over the place. The touch buttons for media playback control, volume adjustment and others are marked with the LEDs too.
There is a bright LED indicator above the touchpad to tell us that it is active. As if that wasn't enough, the Satellite logo on the bottom left of the palmrest is LED-lighted. Honestly, I found the LEDs a bit too excessive while, surprisingly, this demo unit does not have a backlit keyboard that would help us when working in the dark.
The screen has two important features that must be highlighted here. First, it is a High Definition WXGA widescreen with the 16:9 aspect ratio, which is the right ratio for movie watching.
More interesting is that some versions of the M500 - including my demo unit - have a screen with touch sensitivity. It is a feature that now appears in a growing number of middle and high-end notebooks.
It enables us to navigate across the entire screen, move the icons around and even scroll around an open Word document just by swiping our finger across the glace screen.
Toshiba also provides a Bulletin Board where we can drag and drop icons in one place to be able to directly access our documents, photos, applications, etc. If we want, we can call up the screen keyboard and enter text directly on the screen.
No, it is not really like the screen that we would have on a Tablet PC, as we cannot use a stylus on it. Still, we can draw lines with our fingertips in Microsoft Paint.
What do I like about this notebook? To start with, the keyboard has flat keycaps, but it is very comfortable to type with. The Home, PgUp, PgDn and End keys are in a separate column, a layout that is my personal favorite.
The two Harman Kardon speakers produce quite strong and high quality audio, much better than what a Thin and Light notebook can deliver.
With a very decent screen, support for high definition audio and a Webcam with a face recognition using its SmartFace technology, Toshiba has clearly done a laudable job on the multimedia side of this notebook.
What leaves to be desired? Not much, except that I think Toshiba was a bit too bold when calling the M500 an "easy-to-carry" notebook.
I have no problem calling it a portable, full-featured machine, but for 2.35 kilograms it may be a bit too punishing for a frequent traveler's shoulder. And, with features such as the touch screen and others, we cannot reasonably expect the battery to last very long.
It is also a bulky machine, so, even when you have well-built shoulder muscle, an overnight professional is likely to have to tote two bags as he rushes to the airline gate - one for his clothes and another for this notebook.
Accustomed to using Thin and Light notebooks with a WEI between 2 and 2.5, I have enjoyed the power of the Satellite M500.
This respectable, Rp 12.5 million (US$1,200) notebook may be short of being a true DTR, but it will help us do a wider variety of work and get everything done more quickly. If your children have not grabbed it from your hands to play their games, that is!
