Toshiba Satellite U840W-107 review

The desktop wallpaper on Toshiba’s latest laptop claims the firm is “leading innovation” and, for once, this might be more than marketing department hyperbole. In a world where it’s difficult to distinguish between hordes of identikit Ultrabooks, the Toshiba Satellite U840W-107 stands apart.

Rather than using a screen with an aspect ratio of 16:9, as used by almost every other modern portable on the market, this machine has a 21:9 panel with an unconventional resolution of 1,792 x 768 spread across its 14.4in diagonal. It’s strikingly different, and it’s a design targeted specifically at those keen on watching movies on their laptops. Play a movie and its pesky black borders disappear, but that isn’t the only advantage.

When we were working on the laptop, we found the ability to have two documents lined up on the screen, side by side, consistently useful. It makes up for the lack of vertical space, which saw us spending more time scrolling than we would on 1,600 x 900 or 1,920 x 1,080 screens.

Critically, though, image quality isn’t brilliant. The gamma level of 1.9 is very close to the ideal of 1.8 and, similarly, a colour temperature measurement of 6,348k isn’t far enough away from the 6,500k ideal to cause issues. Brightness is fine at 344cd/m2, too, but viewing angles aren’t great, and critically the contrast ratio of 232:1 is low. This means movie scenes lack punch and depth, which is hardly ideal.

This is a shame, as the U840W is certainly striking. The wristrest, lid and base are all covered with soft, textured material, and the rest of the machine is clad in brushed metal. We have a few complaints about build quality – there’s a little give in both screen and base, and the Toshiba is a little chunkier than rivals at 20mm thick and 1.7kg in weight, but that’s about it.

The backlit keyboard makes a good first impression, but it soon disappoints. The base is bouncy and the keys don’t have enough travel to make for comfortable typing, and Toshiba has used the sheer width of the U840W to fit in extra wide keys rather than a number pad. We found this made it tricky to get to grips with, and it doesn’t help that the right-hand side of the spacebar proved unresponsive.

At least the trackpad is good: smooth and responsive, with a firm click and a pair of comfortable buttons built into its bottom corners. And the Harman Kardon-branded speakers flanking the keyboard are among the loudest we’ve heard on a laptop, with enough volume to fill a small room.

Processing power comes from an Intel Core i5-3317U. This is an Ivy Bridge part, which sounds good, but in fact it’s the weakest mobile Core i5 chip in Intel’s current range. Its twin cores run at 1.7GHz, and they delivered a benchmark score of 0.62. That’s on a par with the Asus Zenbook UX31E but behind the Apple MacBook Air, which scored 0.68. Battery life stretches to 6hrs 57mins in our light use test, which for an Ultrabook isn’t that impressive either.

The rest of the Toshiba’s specification fits the Ultrabook blueprint. There’s a 32GB SSD used for caching, and a 500GB mechanical hard disk for the donkey work. Six gigabytes of RAM comes as standard, and connectivity is handled by 10/100 Ethernet and single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi. And of course, being an Ultrabook, there’s no optical drive, which puts a dent in this laptop’s movie-watching credentials.

One thing the low-power processor does have going for it is Intel’s HD Graphics 4000 chipset. It’s the more powerful of the two integrated cores introduced with Ivy Bridge, and it helped the Toshiba to a score of 34fps in our Low-quality Crysis benchmark. That figure dropped by only two frames when we ran the benchmark at the screen’s native resolution.

Toshiba’s U840W packs in plenty for £899 inc VAT, with a wide screen, distinctive chassis and beefy speakers. But there isn’t quite enough quality on show for our liking: the screen isn’t punchy enough, the keyboard is disappointing and performance middling. For this sort of money, unless you desperately want the strange, super-wide screen, we’d opt for a 13in MacBook Air instead.

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