Compare Prices on Toshiba PLL20U-00P01D
UPDATE:
Just in case you determine to order a case for this netbook, preserve in mind that the dimensions in the Amazon description or Toshiba's website (10.4 x 7.6 x 1.27 inches) are the dimensions of this netbook WITHOUT the 6-cell battery. If you notice at the side-view photo in the Amazon description place (the one with the 7.6" measurement upright below it), you'll study it's pictured without the battery. I objective measured mine and with the 6-cell battery protruding from the aid, it's actually 10.4 x 8.4 x 1.27 so many of the cases you accept on Amazon made for 10" netbooks may not fit the NB205 with the 6-cell battery. Okay that's it for my update... read on for my current review...
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I honest received my Toshiba NB205 yesterday and after spending many hours "playing" with it, I can easily say that, hands down, it is the BEST Netbook on the market today!
At the raze of next week, I'll be traveling overseas and I wanted a microscopic and lightweight laptop that I would be able to expend to glance movies on the plane, transfer vacation photos and videos to, and spend the internet for researching stuff from my hotel room. I currently fill a 15" Macbook Pro but decided I didn't want to engage it with me since it's a bit bigger & heavier and I can't afford to lose it. That's when I began researching these Atom-based Netbooks.
When I started researching, the Toshiba NB205 had not yet been released but there were smooth many netbook models out there by other manufacturers. I had originally considered the Samsung NC10, Acer Aspire One AOD250, Asus 1000HE, and Lenovo S10 as they all were shapely considerable equipped with similar configurations (Atom N270/N280 1.6 or 1.66Ghz cpu, 10" conceal, 1GB ram, 160GB HD, 6-cell Li-Ion battery, Windows XP Home) and priced in the $350-400 tag range. I won't go into too great detail about what I liked or didn't like about the other products but I had radiant great narrowed it down to either the Samsung NC10 or the Acer AOD250. Then I came across a pre-release review from Laptop Magazine on the Toshiba and decided to wait on my netbook. It was definitely worth the wait considering this is the first netbook I've reach across that actually had noticeable differentiating features. When you compare all the others, it's kind of hard to determine from one over the other because they're all so similar!
The 4 biggest selling points on this Toshiba NB205 that had me wait for it was the 9-hour battery life, the witness & feel of the keyboard, the size of the trackpad & buttons, and the overall aesthetics of it.
The whole point of buying a laptop this diminutive and compact is for its portability factor. When you have to lug a brick-based AC adapter with you in apprehension the battery in your laptop won't last as long as you need it, it obvious interferes with how portable carrying a laptop really is. A 9-hour lithium-ion battery will definitely solve that quandary. Most of you are probably wondering how realistic that 9-hour rating really is... Let me fair reassure you all, the battery life is Helpful! I brought it to a chubby charge, then unplugged it from the adapter and watched two movies on it (more on the movie playback capabilities later) and did 4 hours worth of web surfing afterwards -- all off the power from the battery on a single charge! You students out there can now bring it to all your classes and not have to ogle for a wall outlet! Oh, btw, I had the conceal brightness site to 1/2 (level 4 brightness setting) and turned off the Bluetooth.
Netbooks are known for smaller keyboards and even worse, Minute trackpads and trackpad button(s) . In addition to the smaller size, many of the netbooks I saw in person at my local Fry's Electronics had very "cheapy"-feeling keyboards -- they unbiased felt genuine fragile compared to the keyboard on my Macbook Pro. Enter the Toshiba NB205. Finally, a netbook that has a keyboard with keys that had the ogle and feel of a Mac keyboard and a robustly solid create to it. In addition to the sight and feel, the keys were also pleasing darn terminate in width to my Mac keyboard (both my Macbook Pro's keyboard, and my desktop Mac's keyboard) . I'll try to post some comparison photos on Amazon this weekend for all those alive to. The trackpad and buttons on the NB205 is also the biggest I've seen in the netbook category. Toshiba did a tall job in getting this moral. Most of the other netbooks had really tiny trackpads and slight minute trackpad button(s) that felt proper flimsy. Another feature that I like with the trackpad that's not stated anywhere is that the very correct edge of the trackpad can be venerable for scrolling web pages or other documents (similar to the one on the Samsung NC10) . This feature is not sure as there are no arrow indicators like there is on the NC10 but it does aid it!
I won't go into the aesthetics of this unit since you can glorious remarkable spy how incredible this netbook looks from the Amazon photos (I'll also add my occupy photos this weekend so you can catch a better feel for the size, etc.) but let me now shift focus on using it.
Although I upgraded the memory on the unit to 2GB (I installed the Crucial 2GB 200-pin SODIMM DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz Memory Module and it works ample with the NB205!), all the testing I performed and am about to narrate was done with the stock 1GB memory.
The very first thing I wanted to build positive this unit can do is play encourage, at the very least, DVD-quality movies (i.e. 480P movies (720x480 resolution) ) . One thing I'd HIGHLY recommend everyone who's enthusiastic in watching movies on their netbook do is download the FREE media player called VLC (Google "download vlc") . VLC is very lightweight and will play abet movies a lot smoother than Quicktime or Windows Media Player; and given the inherently slower speeds of these Intel Atom processors compared to the Intel Core 2 Duo processors, using the VLC media player is your best bet. Using a free program called "Handbrake", one can convert their Bluray or DVD movies to AVC/h.264-encoded movies, which is what I conventional to convert some of my Bluray collection into a format that can be played-back on my NB205. Since it's out of the scope of this review and would require a tutorial guide of its gain, I won't be able to justify how you would go about converting your Bluray or DVD movies. Anyhow, I first converted my Bluray edition of Valkyrie to a 720x480 resolution with a conservative 864kbs bitrate. The NB205 had NO PROBLEMS playing it serve... It played assist with very aloof video and the audio was synced up perfectly throughout the entire movie. So I decided to convert the movie again.... this time, using more aggressive settings... I converted it to a resolution of 1024x600 (since this is the native resolution of the NB205's camouflage) and a 2048kbps bitrate. Again, the NB205 was able to play the movie without a hitch. I didn't bother trying to convert the movie to 720P since the native resolution of the shroud is only 1024x600 (it would be equivilent to 600P but 600P is not a standard) . If you're planning to peep movies on the NB205 with someone else, you'll be satisfied to know that watching it from a 45 degree angle is very acceptible. Beyond the 45 degree angle, you won't be able to really ogle grand so don't request to have more than 3 people watching from it (why would you have more than 2 or 3 people watching off a 10" veil anyways!? ) .
Given it's capability to playback movies very smoothly, anything else I was going to throw at it would be child's play. Anyhow, I was reading that this laptop does gather hot but after playing encourage two movies on it, it was not unbearable when resting it on my lap. So it doesn't seem like overheating problems will be too powerful of a trouble for this laptop (but only long-term usage can really confirm this) .
Another frosty feature the NB205 sports that I'm not definite is available on all the other competitor models is a built-in accelerometer. It works the same design as the iPhone accelerometer but it's in the NB205 purely to detect if the laptop is about to acquire a drop. When it detects motion, it lickety-split moves the hard drive heads away from the hard drive to prevent any mishaps in case the hard drive is currently reading from or writing to the hard disks. Using a Toshiba software utility that's installed from the factory, you can change the sensitiviy threshold of the accelerometer or turn it off altogether.
There are obviously a lot more features that the NB205 comes with but I'm not going to interpret each one simply because they're self-explanatory (such as bluetooth, wifi, etc.) but you can rep out more about those features in Amazon's description of this product.
One final ticket before I achieve my review... Toshiba released two main models of the NB205 on the same day... the NB205-N310/311/312/313 (which is the model I have -- the NB205-N310/BN to be sincere) and the NB205-N210. I contemplate if you want to set aside $50, the NB205-210 would be a estimable choice as well -- provided you don't need Bluetooth or the Mac-style "chiclet" keyboard. For the extra $50, though, you also collect the considerable sleeker, original Toshiba-styling of the NB205-N31X series.
So if you're in the market for a very portable laptop, and you're considering a 10"-based netbook, the Toshiba NB205 is packed with features, enclosed around a very aesthetically aesthetic body, and is very competitively priced!!!
Went out last night to see at netbooks for the hundredth time. After looking at the same ole dead models, plastic, little, creaky, cheap feeling, I came across this beauty. A very sturdy model, well made, and I was twisted on first station. After thinking that it was fair an visual thing, I started to type away on the keyboard and what a thing of heavenly engineering. The Home, Waste, PrtSc keys are all in the friendly region at the upper accurate, some other netbook keyboards required the consume of the Fn key to employ those keys (this model includes separate page up and down keys too) . The cover is nice and lustrous, I was able to compare it side by side with a Dell mini and the Eee 1005HA and the Toshiba came out on top!!! Lastly, the touch pad is top of the line. It is not too slight and there are separate L and R buttons located on the bottom of the pad like a "normal" laptop. As you know some other manufacturers gain one rectangular button on the bottom or one on each side of the track pad...this one is, again, top notch.
For the money, you can not go harmful with purchasing this laptop. Colossal feel, sturdy develop, awesome battery life, and you unbiased feel well-behaved using it 
Hopefully this helps in your decision concerning a netbook select.
I unbiased got my NB205 last Saturday. So these are initial, early impressions.
#1 (abominable first impression) : It took all afternoon and into the evening to rep the unit talking to my LinkSys WRT54G wireless router. The wireless communication was connected, the router had assigned an IP address, but the NB205 refused to procure it. It sat at "acquiring IP address" until it timed out. I have a static IP block reserved on my router, so I gave the NB205 a static IP address and filled in the gateway and DNS server IPs, and it *still* wouldn't talk. In technical parlance, it wasn't fair a jam with ARP - the entire transport layer simply wasn't working.
A wired connection to the router worked fair. But that wasn't a workaround that I was prepared to obtain.
I researched on the Web and found that various Toshiba models seem to have a lot of anxiety with wireless, and that there are probably a hundred different things that people said finally got theirs working.
What finally worked for me was to turn off WEP security on both the router and the NB205. That immediately got them talking, at the expense of breaking all of my other wireless links (two computers and a Wii) . Then I turned WEP help on, and they stayed talking. No problems since. EDITED: after over two months, calm no plight. It was unbiased the one-time startup.
#2 (fine) : The battery life is aesthetic danged long. Maybe not the claimed nine hours, but seven or eight (with WiFi turned off and using power-saver profile) . I suspect that a favorable allotment of that comes from using an e-IPS explain.
#3 (dreadful but expected) : The manual is provided on the hard drive, not in print. The manual is disorganized and mostly useless. This seems to be par for the course for unusual computers.
#4 (very slightly terrible) : The manual says that if you shut the unit down by closing the lid (sleep mode, hibernate, or whatever) that when you originate the lid it'll begin help up. It doesn't. You have to press the power button. EDITED: It will advance assist on automatically if you've left it plugged into AC power the whole time. It doesn't if it's unplugged, which for me is splendid worthy "always".
#5 EDITED: (very annoying until I figured out what was unfavorable) : I had given up on using Sleep/Standby mode because about half of the time when I turned it attend on the unit completely rebooted. Hibernate mode always seemed to work. The pickle turned out to be that one of the latches for the battery pack wasn't locked, and the netbook would lose power if the unit was lifted in a diagram that tried to separate the pack from the main unit. So it was my bear error, but I learned to pay attention to those latches.
#6 (generally grand) : I got this netbook specifically for writing. The keyboard seemed to be the best available in the netbook gain factor, and I'm finding the keyboard to be quite usable for extended typing sessions. A couple of keys got relocated into funky positions, though. (Maybe other netbook keyboards do the same, I don't know.)
#7 (capable) : The touchpad is the first one that I've found to be actually usable.
#8 (mildly concerning) : I had to turn off the vibration alerts because every time I click the touchpad, it sets off the vibration detector.
So... splendid keyboard, friendly touchpad, superb reveal, estimable battery life. That's what I needed, and it's working out well. But I have smooth some scars from the rough edges of getting it location up and the power on/off arrangements.
FIVE DAYS LATER (an update) : I'm really enjoying this puny guy. I finally got everything configured the plot that I want, and I admire working with it. My only day-to-day complaint is a funny one: I sometimes write while lying down, with my legs hooked and the netbook propped against my legs, and in that space the clicker buttons on the touchpad rest against my belly and tend to click when I don't want them to. I've learned to expend Fn-F9 to disable the touchpad while I'm doing that.
