Toshiba Portégé M200 Tablet PC review

Xiao Ming Wu & Charles McLellan CNET

Published: 08 Jun 2004

Toshiba's Portégé M200 offers a nice balance of features that lets it successfully walk the line between ultraportable notebook and tablet PC -- and mobile technology is all about balance. The Portégé M200 lacks an internal optical drive, but you can also buy the system bundled with an external USB DVD/CD-RW combo drive. Toshiba's convertible notebook can swivel into a tablet, and it includes support for wireless, Ethernet and dial-up networking. It also has one VGA and two USB ports, plus a PC Card and an SD card slot.

Design

Like other convertible tablets, the Toshiba Portégé M200 has a swivel hinge at the base of the display that lets you flip and fold the screen into tablet mode. It's neither the biggest nor the lightest convertible tablet we've reviewed, but it successfully integrates a nice array of features into a decidedly svelte, ultraportable design weighing 2kg.

We like the full-size keyboard, which makes for comfortable typing despite the condensed form factor. The convertible tablet's no-frills touchpad lacks dedicated scroll areas and extra buttons, but it is responsive and configurable. The Portégé M200 is also easy to control as a tablet. Its well-designed pen and touch-sensitive TFT display makes navigating and writing on the screen as easy as using the keyboard and the mouse. We also like the spring-loaded pen docking slot on the right side.

A modest array of ports and controls graces the edges of the system. The back panel harbours a VGA port for an external display, two USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, and an RJ11 port for the tablet's built-in 56Kbps modem. The front panel contains a conveniently located volume wheel, along with microphone and earphone jacks and an SD card slot. There's also a handy hardware on/off switch for the wireless adapter on the right-hand side, which can help save your battery when you're not using the network.

Features

The Portégé M200 combines the full array of features you'd expect from an ultraportable with the functionality of a tablet PC. It lacks an integrated optical drive, but you can buy it bundled with a slim USB DVD/CD-RW combo drive that runs on either battery or AC power.

The Portégé M200 is built around a 1.6GHz Intel Pentium M processor and the 855PM chipset, with an Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 802.11b adapter making it a true Centrino system. Our review model also had Bluetooth built in, along with Fast infrared, making it an extremely wireless-connected system. The basic configuration includes 256MB of memory, upgradeable to 2GB via the system's two DIMM slots. The hard drive is a 60GB unit.

At 12.1in., the Toshiba Portégé M200's TFT display is small, especially considering its 1,400 by 1,050 SXGA resolution. Fonts and icons are predictably tiny, but the display's vibrant colours and wide viewing angle make it a pleasure to use. The display's large desktop can come in handy if you work with high-resolution images, and the 32MB Nvidia GeForce FX Go 5200 graphics chip is powerful enough to support small-scale video editing and Web design.

Performance & battery life

To measure mobile application performance and battery life, we use BAPCo's MobileMark 2002. MobileMark measures both application performance and battery life concurrently using a number of popular applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator 6, WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, and Macromedia Flash 5.0).

Although the Portégé M200 has a 1.6GHz CPU, it only comes with 256MB of RAM, which goes a long way towards explaining why it lags behind its Tablet PC competitors. The Portégé M200 scored a relatively modest 103 on MobileMark 2002, compared to 124 for the HP Compaq Tablet PC TC1100 and 140 for Fujitsu Siemens' Stylistic ST5010. Both of the latter systems have 512MB of RAM and 1GHz Pentium M processors.

In the battery rundown portion of MobileMark 2002, the Portégé M200 lasted for a reasonable 3 hours and 16 minutes. We ran the test with the notebook in desktop mode and the display at its highest brightness. You can expect to extend battery life well beyond three hours by selecting more conservative power management settings.

Service & support

The Portégé M200 carries a generous three-year international warranty. It comes with a useful, 76-page, printed resource guide. You also get a separate user guide on the accompanying CD, which largely reiterates the information in the resource guide. The company's Web site hosts driver downloads and BIOS updates, an online knowledgebase, FAQs and PDFs of the product documentation.

• 
• 
• 
• 

• Share this article:
• Digg
• Slashdot
• Del.ici.ous
• Stumble
• Reddit