Toshiba Satellite Radius 11
The Toshiba Satellite Radius 11 is a budget Windows laptop with 11.6in touchscreen. Just like the Lenovo Yoga 3, its display can spin right around to make a clunky tablet. Costs have been cut to bring the price down to £329 by direct sale from Toshiba’s website, although various compromises will undermine the user experience.
In its gold-effect lacquered finish, the L10W looks smart, featuring a painted coarse-textile effect on its smooth lid back and genuine textured plastic underside. Powering the compact laptop is an Intel Celeron N2840 processor, a budget dual-core design designed for low-end consumer laptops. This is clocked at 2.19GHz and has a little scope to run faster, to 2.58GHz, using a what Intel calls Burst Technology, believed to be a more basic version of its Turbo Boost Technology. Supporting the processor is 4GB of 1600MHz memory – not upgradeable – and a 500GB hard-disk drive.
Toshiba has preinstalled regular Windows 8.1, a step away from the free version that Microsoft now offers to hardware partners on the condition that they don’t try to earn kickback revenue from Google or other search engines by turning off Bing. But without those conditions attached to the regular Windows OEM edition, Toshiba has instead taken the opportunity to claw back its investment and turn some profit by including plenty of third-party sponsorship.
Skyscanner, Spotify, eBay, Google and Amazon are five companies that appear unbidden in Internet Explorer’s favourites bar, on the Windows desktop or the main taskbar, while Intel’s McAfee division wants to prise money from the hapless laptop buyer to keep using its pre-installed virus software. New IE web pages open with both MSN and link aggregator Symbaloo pages. But award for the cheekiest piece of affiliate marketing must go to Toshiba’s removal of Windows’ built-in free archive extraction tool, for opening .zip files. Instead, any .zip file must be opened by the commercial WinZip program that’s been installed, prices starting at £22.36.
Ports and connectors are limited, but no more so than many ultraportable-class laptops today. Two USB ports are included, USB 3.0 to the left and USB 2.0 to the right. There’s an HDMI output for connection to a monitor, TV or projector, and an SDXC slot for memory cards. A single 3.5mm headset jack lets you connect earphones with mic for video chats, for example. But missing from the laptop is any ethernet network port.
To get online, the L10W instead relies on its basic Wi-Fi facility, which connects to wireless networks up to 11n spec, albeit with the slowest single-channel configuration.
The display is a budget TN touchscreen with a poor contrast ratio and limited colour capability – to wit, just 80:1 and only 56 percent of the sRGB colour space. Its pixels span 1366x768, a low resolution for laptop screens but helped here by filling an 11.6in rather than 15.6in panel. Consequently, its pixel density of 135ppi is better than the latter 100ppi, meaning not such grainy screen typography. Maximum brightness of the display was a comparatively low 191cd/m2.
Rectangular, not square, tiles make up an otherwise standardissue Scrabble-tile keyboard, slightly reduced in height to fit the smaller frame of an 11.6in screen laptop.
The trackpad is a traditional buttoned design, rather than buttonless, which is more welcome on low-cost laptops since the cheapest buttonless pads rarely work well. Here though the buttons themselves are something of a struggle to operate, require concerted finger/thumb downforce to click. In use, we noticed random pauses and slowdowns from the Toshiba, with the trackpad seemingly broken at times.
Below Intel’s Core series processors lies the range now named Pentium. Below that Pentium range are the Celeron series as used in this Toshiba. Consequently expectations for good performance should not be high.
In the Geekbench 3 test of CPU and memory speed, the Toshiba scored 1069 points single-core, and 1863 points multi-core. For context, an Apple iPhone 5s from 2013 scores 1412- and 2537 points respectively in the same test. In other words, the 2.16GHz Intel Celeron markedly trails a two-year old telephone with 1GHz processor.
Gaming with modern Windows action games is not really an option with the ‘Intel HD Graphics’ integrated into this Celeron chip. We tried Batman: Arkham City at screen native resolution and High detail, and the game averaged just 11 frames per second. Falling back to 1280x720 and Medium detail, it rose to a still effectively useless 14fps; dropping to Low detail added one more frame per second.
In our battery life tests the Toshiba was not too terrible, lasting a minute shy of five hours (four hours, 59 minutes) in our standard looped-video rundown test over Wi-Fi.
Verdict
As a laptop, it’s rather slow, while an arguably superfluous touchscreen means costs have been cut elsewhere to accommodate this divisive feature.