Toshiba Satellite U845W Ultrabook Review: Going Wide at 21:9
by Dustin Sklavos on October 16, 2012 12:01 AM ESTConclusion: A Niche Worth Exploring
I've come away from my time with the Toshiba Satellite U845W with a largely favorable impression. What Toshiba has achieved here is very respectable and worthy of attention: they've designed a notebook that's pleasing to look at and by and large excellent for productivity. Intel's ultrabook initiative has meant a glut of similar designs hitting the market with different vendors prioritizing only slightly different aspects of the experience (much as has happened with Android tablets), so it's good to see Toshiba produce something genuinely distinctive that sets them apart from the pack.
In terms of build and design, I found the U845W to feel pretty durable. The materials used are solid and the whole thing feels well crafted. The aluminum and brown accents are also surprisingly attractive, taking the distinguishing point (the ultra wide display) and pushing further into making the U845W a unique product. Meanwhile, though the display quality is still on the mediocre side, the increased resolution makes it more suitable for productivity tasks, and Toshiba was able to eke a healthy amount of battery life out of the U845W while still keeping it running both cool and quiet. No trade-offs really needed to be made.
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At the same time, though, my enthusiasm for the U845W starts to wane when I look at what I consider to be the major miscalculations of the design. 10/100 internet in a $700 notebook in 2012 is unacceptable, period, end of discussion. Many users will be able to live without, but we're still stuck with 2.4GHz wireless and no way to upgrade it internally. The mushy keyboard is the nail in productivity's coffin, though. The U845W threatens to be a fantastic solution for a lot of users, so why cheap out on one of the most crucial parts of the experience?
Thankfully, Toshiba makes back a lot of ground on price. The $999 MSRP is on the cusp of reasonable, but the $699 price in retail is far more palatable and makes this unique ultrabook affordable for most people as opposed to just the bleeding edge consumers. With that in mind, I feel like the gulf between this $699 model with 500GB of mechanical storage supplemented by 32GB of SSD cache and the $1,159 model with just a 256GB SSD is far too great, especially when you can get 256GB SSDs for under $200. Toshiba should consider a model with a 128GB SSD at around $899 retail.
As for my wish list, I think Toshiba has the makings of a premium product with the U845W but actually needs work on the internals. I'd personally like to see a low end dedicated GPU option, a/b/g/n wireless, and the ethernet upgraded to the gigabit it should've been in the first place. The CPU is honestly fine for most users, and the middle ground 128GB SSD I suggested earlier would be fine for finishing it off.
If it weren't for the keyboard I would have few reservations about recommending the Toshiba Satellite U845W, but because it's (at least in my opinion) just that bad, you're going to want to see if you can try it out in retail before taking the plunge. Alternatively you can take advantage of Amazon's fairly lax return policy if everything else here appeals to you. I think Toshiba put a very strong foot forward with the U845W by introducing a notebook with an ultra wide display and then backing it up with a mostly solid design; now they need to go back and iterate. A second generation model with at least some of the changes I requested would easily be editor's choice material.
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kevith - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
No thanks.Belard - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
This is SOOOO Amiga 2000/4000 and Commodore 64.Exodite - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
To be fair though, the Amiga at least ran much better aspect ratios.StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
Would have had me on board if:* No TN panel. IPS, anything IPS, even E-IPS or even VA would be better.
* Double the 768 vertical resolution as it is painful regardless of how wide a panel is.
* Decent Graphics (Refuse to use Intel graphics after the last several decades of poor IGP's with even worse drivers which are still crap today.) or went with AMD's trinity.
* Better network connectivity.
As for peoples qualms about the wider aspect, to me it's fantastic but I also game in eyefinity so I'm used to having extra wide screens.
Unfortunately, companies like Toshiba would never bother reading the comments here at Anandtech to see what people want, instead we get the same let-downs from all manufacturers. :(
AssBall - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
I'm sure Toshiba does care about your comments. Considering 0.01% of their customers read Anandtech, and 1% of those feel the same way you do. It's definitely folks like you who who want a $3500 dollar laptop who drive their billion dollar worldwide mobile computing roadmap.Belard - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
Am I missing something here? I really don't see much of a reason for this odd-ball shaped screen, already 16:9 (standard) screens SUCK! 16:10 is better.A more usable resolution in 1920x1080, easily possible on todays 13~14" displays.
You can STILL work on documents side by side WHILE having some height to work with and not get that tunnel vision feeling.
tomeklutel - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
Widescreen laptops just doesn’t make sense. When we spend most of our time working with spreadsheets, text documents, and web browsers, we want a higher resolution with a longer page. Widescreen laptops are actually lower resolution and cheaper to manufacture, so largest companies were convincing that 16:10, then 16:9 is the best format for your eyes. Lot of business people and heavy users still prefer 4:3 screen. Join our community to show your demand for bringing back 4:3 screens to people - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bring-Back-43-Lapto...Paulman - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
But if you make it WIDE-screen ENOUGH, then all of a sudden you can fit two windows side by side as you work or you can have one big window and still enough screen real estate on the side to have your IM window open, or some video going on the side, or CPU monitor stuff, etc.It may not be the most common use scenario, but for some people they might really get a lot out of it. It sounds pretty interesting and kind of attractive to me (I just tried using two windows side by side on my 16:9 HDTV I use as my main monitor and it works pretty well. I'm typing this comment on the right while a Starcraft 2 live video stream with chat box is going on on the left).
The real killer use-case for this would be when you need to write or edit a document while doing research on the Internet, or working with some crazy-wide Excel spreadsheet, etc. Those kinds of people would be REALLY interested in this kind of ultrabook.
knedle - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
I think that there is one big difference between your scenerio and this netbook.You have HDTV monitor, and this notebook has low resolution monitor, which in fact makes many other things difficult. For example web browsing. Websites aren't wide, they are long in terms of height and imagine how much scrolling it's gonna to be on 768 pixels high monitor.
DanNeely - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
Andrew Cunningham reviewed the U845W for Ars Technica last month. The problem is that most websites (and applications) really want to be at least 1024 wide so it didn't work out that well. H was interested in trying the same thing at 2100x900; which would be wide enough to make side by side generally workable and have a halfway decent vertical resolution as well.http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/putting-the...