Toshiba Equium U400 Laptops - Small, Mighty and Portable

Toshiba has released laptops under the Equium U400 (PSU42E) series in Europe. These are designed to be ultra portable 13.3" laptops for road warriors. They feature dual core pentium processors, inbuilt 1.3MP camera, microphone, glossy black finish and a under £430 price tag, but you wont spot them easily because they are not being marketed with so much rigour. If you are in the market for buying a new laptop you should seriously check them out.

Having been an owner of a 15.4" 3Kg laptop, I know that such a machine is far from being portable. You can carry it around once or twice but unless someone is paying you to do it, you wont want to lug a beast like that around. If your laptop is 17" you will never want to move it anywhere and you are seriously better off buying a quad-core desktop computer and a 22" television/screen. It will work out cheaper and have more expansion slots.

Recently the laptop market has been plagued by Netbooks being palmed off as portable laptops. These pea-brained pieces of worthless technology are being sold at very high prices on the high-street and this has caused a unnecessary increase in prices of real portable laptops. See no one would buy a Netbook if they could get a proper full fledge portable laptop for nearly the same price!

No surprise then that Toshiba Equium U400 Series has been downplayed, and recently even removed from display in many high street stores. They have been moved into clearance sections or can only be bought online. Such treatment is not a testament to the great pieces of technology these laptops are. Find a Sony laptop with the same specification and you could easily find yourself paying over £750.

Features
So what do they feature? Well there are three models in the series the U400-124, U400-145 and the U400-146. They look identical and use the same glossy black chassis but the U400-146 has most powerful and pricey specifications of the series. Before I go into the differences I'll discuss what is common to the models.

All three U400 series laptops have identical 160GB SATA 5400RPM hard drive and super multi dual-layer DVD rewriter drives. They have a 13.3" WXGA TFT bright display which runs off the Intel GMA X3100 graphics chipset with 358MB shared graphics memory. They have identical dimensions and weigh 1.9Kg. Inbuilt wireless LAN, multimedia bar with 6 feather-touch keys, 1.3Mp web camera, integrated microphone, Intel HD Dolby audio support, integrated 5 in 1 card reader, USB Sleep'n Charge, HDMI port, Firewire port, 56k Modem, HD 720p support, 4-cell li-ion battery (3Hr), Windows Vista Home Premium licence and Toshiba face recognition software is also common to all models.

U400-145
The U400-145 features an Intel Pentium dual-core T2390 processor that runs at 1.86GHz and FSB 533Mhz and 1MB cache. It also has 2GB of DDR2 RAM running at 667Mhz. If you need Bluetooth with this model you can purchase an adapter.

U400-124
The U400-124 features the more recent and powerful Intel Pentium Core2 Duo dual-core T5550 processor that runs at 1.83GHz and FSB 667Mhz and 2MB cache. It has 2GB of DDR2 RAM running at 667Mhz. In addition it has in-built Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity.

U400-146
The U400-146 also features the Intel Pentium Core2 Duo dual-core T5750 processor that runs at 2.0GHz and FSB 667Mhz and 2MB cache. It has 3GB of DDR2 RAM running at 667Mhz. This also has in-built Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity.

Usability
The laptops feel fast and easy to use. Windows Vista Areo runs without hiccups. The keyboard is comfortable and has UK layout. The touch pad is very responsive. There are white indicators for power, battery, mains, hard drive and memory card. The indicators can be ON/OFF or Orange. Orange indicates a special status for example low-battery or sleep mode. Overall the white light shining through the glossy black chassis looks great. The touch keys and the Equium logo can glow with a white light and this can be switched on in low-light conditions to help illuminate the keyboard. The laptop hardware fully supports Vista sleep mode allowing the device to switch quickly to a low power state when the lid is closed or when not in use without turning off. Hibernation is supported as well. The hardware is also compatible with Ubuntu Linux and no proprietary drivers are needed though the camera is not (yet) detected by Ubuntu.

The Downsides
There are no major downsides. The touch pad could have been a bit larger. Some users may find the hard drive capacity of 160GB a bit limited, specially since most laptops now come with a 250GB or higher capacity hard drive. In my opinion it is always possible to use a portable external hard-drive of larger capacity for storing media files. If you really want a better hard-drive inbuilt, it is fairly easy to purchase and install one yourself. If you really really want a larger drive check out the Satellite U400-22N which is a extremely identical Satellite model with a 250GB drive.

Where to Buy
Try these links (If the link does not open on the model specific page, the model is sold out) U400-124, U400-145, U400-146.

Contenders
Too late? Cant find one of the U400 series? Well there is one contender that closely meets their specifications and price. The Acer 2930.