Toshiba's Satellite Pro T2150CDT offers almost everything
Rex Baldazo
Usually you have to pay top dollar for premium performance and features. Multimedia laptops with a fast CPU, a good color screen, decent battery life, built-in speakers, and a CD-ROM drive usually cost a king's ransom. But sometimes a manufacturer comes up with a product that strikes a smart balance between power and price.
Toshiba has hit that target with the
Satellite Pro T2150CDT
. It's not as fast as the highest-end models, and it lacks some desirable features (e.g., video input/output) that are found on other multimedia portables. But it does offer most of the features you'd expect at a very competitive price.
Sights and Sounds
The 6.9-pound Satellite Pro is built on a solid fou
ndation: a 75-MHz 486DX4 processor with 8 MB of RAM (expandable to 32 MB) and a 500-MB internal hard drive. There's also an internal double-speed CD-ROM drive that opens from the right side of the machine. The 3.5-inch floppy drive, however, is an external unit. When it's attached to the left side of the machine, the complete system is rather wide and not well suited to airline tray tables.
The CD-ROM tray can be opened even when the computer is turned off. We're not sure that's a good idea, because the tray might pop open while the machine is stowed for travel. Fortunately, the eject button is recessed to help protect against such accidents.
An
internal PCMCIA bay
accepts either one Type III or two Type II cards. If you can forgo the external floppy drive, the Satellite Pro becomes exceptionally portable because the AC power supply is built in--there's no heavy power brick to lug around. The only extra piece you need to carry is the power cord. And the whole package sti
ll weighs less than 7 pounds.
The 10.4-inch active-matrix screen can display more than 64,000 colors at 640- by 480-pixel resolution. We found the screen very readable, even outdoors on a bright New England winter day. Our only complaint is that it doesn't fold all the way back, so you can't slide it under a monitor stand while working at your desk.
Stereo sound is built in, but stereo speakers are not--there's just one. For true stereo, you'll have to plug in a pair of external speakers or headphones (not included). A little knob controls the volume of both the headphones and the internal speaker, quite useful when you accidentally start Doom with the sound turned up.
In our Thumper 2 word processing test, we measured battery life at a respectable 5 hours and 12 minutes. For our CD-ROM test, we played Rebel Assault and exhausted the battery after 2 hours and 5 minutes. Unlike IBM's ThinkPad 755CD, the Satellite Pro doesn't have a joystick port, so we had to use the AccuPoint controller o
n the keyboard instead.
Performance on the BYTE benchmarks met expectations for a 75-MHz 486DX4 (
see the table
). CD-ROM performance, as tested with the CDStone suite, was on target for a double-speed player.
Luxury Lite
IBM's ThinkPad 755CD costs around $8000. Toshiba's Satellite Pro comes close to matching its features--and even outperforms the ThinkPad in terms of battery life and CD-ROM speed--for about $3000 less. What's the catch?
Making the comparison to sports cars is inevitable: You might buy a Mitsubishi Eclipse because it's affordable and well built, but you can't help lusting after the unreachable Acura NSX. The ThinkPad is a high-end dream machine, a multimedia portable that's refined, well engineered, and loaded with options. If money were no object, the choice would be easy.
But the Satellite Pro T2150CDT offers almost as much for a lot less cash. Toshiba has done an intelligent job of integrating most of the features
you'll need in a multimedia laptop without busting your budget.
PERFORMANCE
Integer index: 0.483349
Floating-point index: 0.271478
CDStone: 2.01
Battery life:
Word processing: 5.20 hours
CD-ROM: 2.10 hours
(1 = 90-MHz Dell Pentium)
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Toshiba Satellite Pro T2150CDT
(8 MB of RAM, 500-MB hard drive).......$4899-$5199 (estimated)
Toshiba America
Irvine, CA 92718
(800) 334-3445
(714) 583-3000
BEST FEATURE
For about $3000 less, Toshiba's Satellite Pro comes close to matching the features of IBM's ThinkPad 755 CD, and its battery even outlasts the ThinkPad's.
photo_link (51 Kbytes)
photo_link (13 Kbytes)
A clever dutch door allows connecting external cables to PCMCIA cards without exposing the entire card bay.
Rex Baldazo is a BYTE technical editor. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
rbaldazo@bix.com
.
Portable Multimedia
