Toshiba Satellite R850 review
We have reviewed Toshiba Satellite L745D few days back, let us take a closer look at another Satellite, the R850.
The Toshiba Satellite R850 is an asset-stripped version of their business Tecra range. Gone is the docking station, gone is the built-in broadband, gone is the trackpoint and even the fingerprint reader. The display port is downgraded to an HDMI port but on more positively, instead of the 500GB hard drive found on the Tecra, the Satellite features a snappy SSD. And there’s now an AMD graphics card. The Satellite R850 costs 1000E. Let’s take a look at some more R850 pictures:
Most of the surfaces are matte black plastic, with a textured display and wrist rest and silver touchpad buttons. A strong internal honeycomb structure, a la MacBook Pro notebooks, makes the R850 feel very solid.
The R850 is generously supplied with connectivity options – there’s one USB-3 and two USB-2 ports, an eSATA/USB-2 port, VGA and HDMI sockets, and a 5-in-1 card reader. Audio sockets have been pared down, so headphone and mic now share a jack. The R850 features WiFi-n and Bluetooth 3 connectivity. And there is a covered slot for a SIM card in the battery compartment.
The Satellite R850 island-style keyboard comes with a full numberpad. Short travel but good pressure point delivers acceptable typing. One useful inclusion is status lights for Num-lock and Caps-lock.
The touchpad is fully multitouch-enabled – two-fingered zoom, rotate, and scroll – and is sensitive right to its edges. There is even pre-loaded software allowing touchpad-controlled forward and back navigation in the browser. Great call, Toshiba.
The 15.6″, 1366 x 768-pixel matt display for the price could have been 1600 x 900. Brightness and contrast are fine for anything other than professional image editing. Viewing angles are fine, and outdoor use brings no reflectivity problems whatsoever.
The hyper-threaded 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-2410M CPU, paired with a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6450M graphics card. 4GB RAM is standard and there’s a second RAM slot waiting to take the R850 to the next level, should you need it. The 128GB SSD on our R850-127 unit shortens boot time and generally opens, closes, and minimises apps noticeably faster. Boot time is 25 seconds, everything loaded. Period. Full shutdown is complete in 12 seconds. An R850-14T with a slower, standard 500GB hard drive and can be bought for 700E. As with most mid-range notebook audio systems, the speakers lack bass.
In benchmarks the dedicated graphics card leaves notebooks without one crawling in the dust, although the R850 is outperformed by the Acer Aspire 4830 and Sony Vaio VPC range, both of which feature higher-specification graphics cards. Current games are only playable at the lowest resolutions, however. Spreadsheets, presentations and general office software, as well as multi-tab browsing are all possible.
Battery life under moderate usage stretches to five hours, or 3 hours for DVD-looping. Flat-out gives just 84 minutes.
Unless you’re planning on playing the latest games, the Satellite R850 is a very capable machine, offering a superior computing experience thanks largely to its SSD. In addition, some market-leading tweaks to the touchpad give superb browsing.
15.6″ Toshiba Satellite R850run by 2.1GHz Intel Core i3-2310M processor, 3GB DDR3 SDRAM, 320GB of storage can be picked up at Amazon for $599.98.
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