The Toshiba Portege 3505 Tablet PC is ranked 8.2 out of 10 by CNET Editors and was awarded an Editors' Choice award.
The good: Great design; screen swivels and folds; fastest CPU for a tablet; largest hard drive; USB 2.0 ports.
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DesignLooking at the black Toshiba Portege 3505, your eye is immediately drawn to the silver hinge in the back, which sticks out like a big, shiny button. Like the Acer TravelMate C102TI, the Portege 3505 is a convertible tablet. The hinge allows the screen to not only open and close but rotate a full 180 degrees side to side so that it can face toward or away from you. Need a standard notebook layout with the keyboard below the screen? No problem. Want a tablet to draw or write on? Just swivel the screen, then lay it flat (see
Figure B). A small but well-designed lock keeps the screen in one position or another, so the display feels surprisingly sturdy.
| Figure B |
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| Here is the Portege in tablet mode. |
With the Portege 3505, you can scribble notes with the screen folded flat, open it up to type some details and description, then finally swivel the screen around to show a group what you've been working on. The more we used the Portege 3505, the more we grew to appreciate this flexible design.
Compared to other tablets, the Portege 3505 has the best place to stash the writing stylus, shown in Figure C. Its handy storage place is next to the screen—not around the system's periphery. When you press the bottom of the pen, it pops out. Unfortunately, to keep the pen flush with the screen frame, it's flat on one side and doesn't feel as nice in your hand as a regular pen.
| Figure C |
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| Here is the penlike stylus. |
Thoughtful touches abound in this design, with a volume thumbwheel and five activity LEDs that show the system's status with a series of icons, as shown in Figure D. There's even a switch to quickly turn off the tablet's Wi-Fi radio for use in sensitive areas and during flights.
| Figure D |
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| Here are the five activity LEDs on the front edge. |
If you expected that the keyboard would be hard to use, you were wrong. With 19mm keys, the system is easy to type on, although the 1.5mm of key travel is a bit skimpy, and the spacebar is anemic. The silver touchpad has smooth action but lacks a scroll key.
Features
It's what's inside that counts, Mom always said, and the Portege 3505 puts many other tablets to shame with a 1.3-GHz Pentium III-M processor (a third faster than most tablets), 512 MB of RAM (twice that of most tablets), and a 40-GB hard drive (double the capacity of its competitors). With a 12.1-inch XGA screen, there's plenty of room to work, and the system effortlessly rotates its orientation at the touch of a button. A Trident CyberAlladdin-T graphics accelerator with 16 MB of RAM controls the screen, which was lightning fast and smooth.
You'll find ports aplenty, with connections for audio, an external monitor, a LAN, and a modem. In a move that shows Toshiba's engineering prowess, the Portege 3505 has a pair of USB 2.0 ports (see Figure E); the rest of the Tablet PCs use the slower USB 1.1.
| Figure E |
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| Here is the screen, swiveled around to the back, where you can see the Portege's two USB 2.0 ports. |
For those who use a digital camera or portable MP3 player, the Portege 3505 may be a godsend. Like the other tablets, it has a PC Card slot. But unlike the others, it can use CompactFlash and postage-stamp-size Secure Digital cards, as shown in Figure F.
| Figure F |
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| Here is the Secure Digital slot and the wireless on/off switch. |
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Performance
With a faster processor and larger hard drive than its competitors, and shared graphics memory, the Portege 3505 was, not surprisingly, the fastest system on CNET Labs' performance tests, though not by the margin that we expected. It also boasted a class-leading Wi-Fi range of 100 feet and successfully translated 93 percent of the words we dictated on more informal tests.
Mobile application performance
The Toshiba Portege 3505, with a 1.3-GHz Pentium III-M processor and 512 MB of RAM, was the fastest machine in a recent study(see Table A). But considering its processor, we expected it to score higher. Instead, it beat the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4000 by only one point, though the Fujitsu is 500 MHz slower. The Portege 3505's lackluster performance can be attributed to its Trident CyberBlade XAi1 graphics controller, which uses 16 MB of main system memory as video RAM.
| Table A |
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| Longer bars indicate faster performance. |
Battery life
The Toshiba couldn't match its top-of-the-heap performance stats in battery life, but it did stay on for a respectable 2 hours, 46 minutes (see Table B). It might have gone longer if it weren't for its 1.3-GHz Pentium III-M, which draws more power than the lower-speed processors of the Fujitsu and the ViewSonic. The only reason the Toshiba's battery life isn't worse is because of its 10.8V, 3,600mAh battery, which goes a long way toward making up for the power-greedy CPU.
MobileMark2002 battery-life test
| Table B |
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| Time is measured in minutes. Longer bars indicate better performance. |
The machine comes with it's ac adaptor and a carry bag!
The machine is in good working condition and the touch screen also works great!
