Toshiba Mini NB505
- Category: Notebook Computers
February 22, 2011
Editor's Rating
- Portable & stylish design
- Comfortable keyboard
- Loud speakers
- Above average battery life
- Touchpad issues
- Mediocre performance
This 10.1-inch netbook from Toshiba comes in a variety of stylish colors and has long battery life, comfortable keyboard and some really loud speakers. The Toshiba Mini NB505 has an Intel Atom CPU with 1GB of RAM and is definitely one portable computer.
The Toshiba Mini NB505 measures 10.3 x 7.5 x 1.4-inches (wdh) and weighs just short of 3 pounds, which means it's extremely portable and lightweight and definitely a computer you can carry around with you throughout the day. Toshiba calls the rubbery finish on this netbook "EasyGrip" and the lid comes in many different colors, including blue, brown, green, orange and turquoise. Our review unit was blue and it looked really good with a deep, almost metallic sheen.
When opened, there's a dimpled pattern alongside the mouse touchpad and is made of a different hard plastic material. The power button under the screen in the middle of the hinge is extremely awkwardly placed and is a little recessed, which makes it rather difficult to press.
The keyboard is made of plastic and don't feel as strong as metal keys, but they still provide a comfortable typing experience. Some of the keys are rather small-sized, including the Enter and right Shift key. The letter keys seem a little wider, which results in less typing errors. The touchpad is well-sized, especially with a 10-inch netbook with a larger keyboard. There's plenty of room for side-to-side mouse navigation, but the sensitivity is a little sketchy, especially when accidently performing "multitouch" gestures with our palm while typing.
Toshiba's 10.1-inch LED-backlit screen has a native resolution of 1024 x 600-pixels and provided wide viewing angles and didn't have much of a glare even though it's glossy. The screen size is small and might discourage some people from buying it, so make sure you try it out before you buy it. Surrounding the display is a rather thick plastic bezel, which actually makes the screen look even smaller.
The speakers on the bottom of the Toshiba Mini NB505 are rather quite powerful and produced good quality sound and they were even quite loud too.
In terms of ports and connectivity, you'll find two USB 2.0 ports on the right side and on the left side, there's one more USB 2.0 port, VGA-out, Ethernet and headphone/microphone audio jacks. The front edge of the laptop also has a SecureDigital memory card slot.
The internal specifications of the Toshiba Mini NB505 include an Intel Atom N455 single-core CPU (1.66GHz), 1GB DDR2 RAM (upgradable to 2GB), a 250GB 5400RPM hard drive, Intel GMA 3150 graphics processor and 802.11b/g/n wireless connectivity. This laptop comes with Microsoft Windows 7 Starter Edition.
The single-core Intel Atom CPU is definitely the lower-end of the spectrum, but that holds true to the cheap price of this laptop. It does perfectly well for productivity tasks, like word processing and Internet use, but too much multitasking does slow down the laptop, especially since it only has 1GB of memory. The integrated graphics processor is completely unable to play any 3D games and is only adequate enough for online video playback and some light multimedia use.
The Toshiba Mini NB505's 6-cell battery lasts an average of 7:00-7:30 hours, which is longer than other similar netbooks by almost an hour.
