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7 out of 8 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"nice looking, easy to use, powerful for size"
Pros: very light,bluetooth and wifi G integrated,full sized keyboard,longer battery
Cons: keyboard flimsy, screen feels flimsy
Summary: Comparison between old R100 and R200!
Just upgraded from Toshiba R100, which failed after liquid spilled on the keyboard! The new R200 unit boasts water resistant keyboard, which is great but with a trade off that keys feel spongy and excessive deflection on the whole keyboard can be seen, when pressing keys, but touch wood if I ever spill liquid on this, it will not kill the mainboard.
The extra 100g on the R200 is well used with integrated Bluetooth 2.0, and bigger battery. Integrated wifi G seems to work at 108Mbps with Dlink turbo Access points. Battery life seems to average around 3.5hrs with both wifi and bluetooth radio perpectually on and medium brightness. I have also noticed, the fan seems to turn on alot more than on the old R100, and the base temperatures are higher too, so either the 1.2Ghz ULV CPU or the GPU gives off alot more heat than the old 1.0Ghz ULV CPU and Trident XP4 GPU.
The R200 I purchased seems to have silver keys, although pretty and space age looking, these show up any dirt or oils from your fingers and will require cleaning more often to keep the cool look. The chrome finishing where the touch pad islocated gets fingerprinted very easilty, and also scratches. On the R200, the back of the screen and the wrist rests are now metallic silver paint with gloss finish on top to make the notebook more stylish. This clear coat seems to scratch easilty too! The Old R100 in comparison had a black rests, which although did not scratch easily, became shiny when sweaty palms continuously contacted with the plastic for extended period of time.
Keyboard operation on the R200 is essentially the same as the R100 with the exception of function and power keys now located on the left hand side of the keyboard whereas on the r100, these keys are located above. now above one can see the a built in microphone on the R200 which seems to be completely absent on the r100. Keyboard size is about the same between the two although the keys at left and right ends are alot shorter than on the R100 due to space made for the new power and function buttons. tab and shift buttons seems to be the most affected in this case.
One can notice that the audio connectors have been changed. The old R100 had both a headphone and microphone jack. The headphone jack remains on the R200, but the microphone jack has been replaced by an analogue volume dial. Guess developers at Toshiba relised that most business people would not require an external mic, and hence put the mic as intenal. I found this new dial extremely useful, as pushing function keys in combination to change volume was too slow, and hastle to use. kudos Toshiba! Now the internal speaker on the R200 is substantially softer than the old R100, to a point that I have to either use headphones or external speakers to play movies or music to a decent level.
Screens on both R100 and R200 are essentially identical, very low contrast ratio and very dim in bright light situations, but this is excusable, since this notebook is essentially "ultra portable"
New Shock loaded screens and hard drives are welcome in the new R200, as the screen is a alot more stiff and less flexible than the R100. In the R100, it was common to get "mould" looking particles forming on the screen, which I was told by a tech was the LCD screen layers comming appart caused by excessive flexibility in the screen. The new 3D active sensing shock system works well which parks the hard drive heads when acceleration is detected, although it can be disabled, on might wonder why would there be a need for disabling such a great protective feature.
The new biometric fingerprint feature seems to be very reliable, and for me saves time logging into the notebook via password, very cool.
Build quality of both notebooks are very similar, although the spongy keyboard on the R200 can get annoying at times. This is possibly due to the water resist feature ion the keyboard.
To Conclude, Toshiba has been making ultra portables for many years now, the first I remember having 10 minute battery life in P3 flavours, to now a glorious 3.5hrs in a great performing centrino base. They have come along way, and the R200 again shows this with its 20th annerversary look and features, and functionality.
