Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba Portege M205-S810 Tablet PC (1.50 GHz Pentium M (Centrino), 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, USB DVD-CD-RW Combo)

This is my second Tablet PC. Since I wrote the book on Tablet PCs (Absolute Beginner's Guide to Tablet PCs), I was able to evaluate most of the ones available. This Toshiba M-200 has the processing speed and 1400x1050 screen to get some serious work done.

Paired with a second LCD display, you have some serious screen real estate. I do a lot of graphics, processing-intensive work, and wireless computing, and this is a terrific machine to do just about anything.

Add some software like OneNote, Corel Painter 8, and FranklinCovey TabletPlanner, and you have a great tool for meetings and ultimate portability.

My prior Tablet PC was the Toshiba Portege 3500, which is also a capable machine. The M200 is more powerful and has better video capabilities, allowing you to run 32-bit color on the built-in display.

The new cross-functional button (more like a joystick) and the four side launch pen buttons are a welcome addition. I do miss the CF Card reader, but it's not that big a deal.

Because this machine is a convertible, there's no learning curve for new Tablet PC users. The screen swivels and folds flat to create a slate that you can write on. I found that because of the faster processor, handwriting and speech recognition is faster.

The only other machine I can recommend is the Panasonic Toughbook CF-18, which is a ruggedized Tablet PC. The Panasonic is not for mainstream users, but if you're constantly out in adverse conditions, the ToughBook has a double-bright screen, small size, sealed ports (Panasonic says to actually run the machine under warm water if you spill coffee on it), and great battery life. But the keyboard is small, so you really do need to have a burning desire for a ruggedized machine.

This is my first notebook computer with an external DVD/CD-writer drive. As it turns out whenever I travel I like to be able to burn a CD-ROM backup of my digital photos and watch DVDs in a hotel room. The DVD drive supplied by Toshiba cannot run from USB power so you end up carting around (1) the notebook, (2) the notebook power supply, (3) the notebook power supply's AC cord, (4) the DVD/CD drive, (5) the DVD/CD drive's external power supply, (6) the DVD/CD drive's external power supply's AC cord. In addition to being cumbersome the external drive was flimsy. The face plate jammed a few times and then fell off altogether. It was definitely not as well protected as the internal DVD/CD drive in my 4-year-old Thinkpad.

The speaker on this notebook can't play loud enough to listen to music or a movie soundtrack. So if you don't like headphones add a 1 lb. battery-powered travel speaker system to your list of stuff to lug around. It would be easier and maybe more compact to get one of those 7 lb. full-size notebooks.

Some combination of operating system and hardware is unequal to the task of playing MP3s or DVDs. Every 5 minutes or so there will be a brief pause in the music or the movie. This is kind of irritating. Anyway if you want to listen to background music budget cost and weight for a separate MP3 player.

Otherwise... no problems! The machine works fine as a notebook and the tablet features are sort of cool for impressing people who've never seen Tablet PC. On the other hand I've never actually managed to do anything useful with the stylus (this is my first Tablet PC).

I'll probably give this away or sell it on eBay as soon as I can get an IBM ThinkPad with a 160 GB hard drive. I prefer the IBM keyboard and the TrackPoint pointing device to the trackpad of the Toshiba.