Toshiba's T115 and T135 thin-and-lights start at $450, offer Intel and AMD flavors

When a manufacturer picks AMD or Intel chips for a particular model, it's often a bit of an exclusive marriage. Toshiba, however, is going Big Love for its new 11.6-inch T115 and 13.3-inch T135 ultraportables, which can both run AMD Neo, AMD Turion or Intel Pentium SU4100 processors. Nothing absolutely blazing, but at the $450 starting point (for AMD) you're hardly past a netbook cost for something considerably peppier. The laptops, which measure less than an inch thick and weigh 3.5 and 3.9 pounds, respectively, offer up 9 hours of battery on Intel and 6 hours on AMD, with the ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics in the latter providing some decent low-power video decoding (including Blu-ray, if you have an external drive). Prices scale up to $700, with a 320GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM at the high end.

We played around with both models, and while there's nothing specific to gripe about, we can't say we're super impressed by Toshiba's heavy handed, ultra-gloss approach. It feels a little last gen and cheap, particularly in comparison to the refined mini NB305 -- whose chiclet keyboard is almost preferable to the slightly mushy keys on display here. The price point and feature set makes these certainly worth a further look, but we wish Toshiba would get over its plastic fetish and make something a bit more desirable.

Toshiba T115 and T135 press shots

Toshiba T115 and T135 hands-on

[Dapman02 Posted Jan 6th 2010 10:21AM]

Argh, so close, but the glossy body kills it
Nice looking laptop/netbook hybrid though.

So far the only think that the new toshiba netbook with pineview qualifies with my needs for a netbook (Read: non-glossy, pineview)

[Dan Fruzzetti Posted Jan 6th 2010 10:44AM]

Actually the horrible warranty service kills it. I have a sad story about Toshiba warranty service after buying a $3600 Portege R500 and having it blow up its mobo three times. The third time they refused to service it.

What do I do? All I can think of is educating other Engadget readers about the pitfalls of big-business warranty service. Avoid.

[Father Dale Posted Jan 6th 2010 12:14PM]

I had a T115 for about a month. It had the best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop. This was pretty much the only thing I liked about it. It attracted fingerprints from as far away as fifty feet, was unremittingly black, with nice unmarked black ports off to the side, and had a power plug sticking out right about where I wanted to use a mouse (to get away from the one-button touchpad). All that plus enough power to run alongside my EEE901? If you really like black on black with smudgies (and a great keyboard), just wait a few months, it should be under $200.

[Fr0 Posted Jan 6th 2010 8:32PM]

You couldn't get a SU4100 (dual core) CPU in the previous model T115, I wonder if you can get a Neo X2 in it...

[ladyguenwyvar Posted Jan 7th 2010 9:41AM]

I have the T135 with the 4100 processor and I greatly enjoy it. Finger print magnet is understating how easily it gets mussed up. Used to be a Vaio gal until I bought it -- but I really enjoy the weight and the real 9 hour battery life. Video sites such as Hulu kind of suck on it, but otherwise it is a fabulous little ultraportable.