Toshiba's Satellite W30t is a Windows 8.1 shot at a laptop and tablet hybrid. Here's our Toshiba Satellite W30t hands-on review from IFA 2013.
Hybrids are all the rage now with manufacturers tying to tempt us with not only a typical laptop, but a tablet in one device. The best of both worlds is generally the idea and this effort is one with a tablet which has a removable keyboard docking station.
See also: Sony Vaio Fit multi-flip PC hands-on review: A Windows 8 laptop and tablet hybrid.
The Satellite W30t has some reasonable specs on board starting with a fourth-generation Intel Haswell processor. The W30Dt is an AMD A4-APU alternative. There's a 500 GB hard drive or an SSD of up to 256 GB with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM.
A bit of time with the device at IFA showed good performance but we'll have to wait until we run some proper benchmarks before we can say for sure what kind of grunt is on offer.
There is a 13.3 in IPS display although the size of the laptop feels like it should have a 15 in screen. Unfortunately it's just a bog standard 1366 x 768 resolution which is nothing to get excited about these days.
As usual, Toshiba is great and providing a good range of ports and here there is micro HDMI, 1x USB 2.0, microUSB and microSD on the tablet and the keyboard section adds a USB 3.0 sleep and charge port.
There are two batteries in the W30t, one in the tablet and one in the keyboard providing up to 10 hours of usage, according to Toshiba. We'll find out how it does in our lab when we get a review unit.
We like the inclusion of a full-size keyboard and a large trackpad. However, the W30t really falls flat on its face in terms of its overall size as weight.
Since the tablet is removable from the keyboard, it needs to contain all the core components. And to this end, it alone weighs nearly 1.3 kg and the keyboard adds a further 1.1 kg which results in one heavy machine to carry around.
The tablet is chunky too, so much so that Toshiba hasn't quoted a dimension for it at the show or in the press material. We even noticed the screen/tablet section slowly falling backwards on its hinge when docked to the keyboard.
We're told that the Toshiba W30t will cost £550 in the UK so at least it won't cost the earth, but with the clunky design we're not sure it's worth it.
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