Toshiba Satellite U845W and U845 Features:Latest

Laptops in 2012 may be thinner and lighter than ever, but the form factor's otherwise been largely untouched. You get a keyboard, a trackpad, a 16:9 widescreen display, and some ports. One of Toshiba's latest Satellite ultrabooks looks like that: the U845 is thin, light, and overwhelmingly laptop-y. But the other new Satellite is a bit different: the U845W's 14.4-inch display is "ultra-widescreen," with a 21:9 aspect ratio that is far wider and shorter than most displays its size. The U845W is focused on multimedia, designed for watching movies as much as for getting work done. Inside, the two devices are still largely the same, featuring the thin, fast, SSD-powered ultrabook specs we've come to expect.
The U845 is somewhat monochrome and innocuous in its design, but for better or worse the same doesn't apply to the U845W. In terms of dimensions, it falls in a unique category: it's as wide (nearly 15 inches) as a 15-inch laptop like the Vizio Thin and Light, but as tall as an 11-inch laptop. It features a distinct two-tone color scheme, with a rubberized gray strip occupying a third of both lid and palm rest plus the whole bottom of the device, and a brushed-metal gray / silver covering the rest. Large speaker grilles flank the U845W's keyboard, whereas the speakers fire downward out of the bottom of the U845. The U845W is ever so slightly thicker and heavier, at 0.81 inches and 4.0 pounds.

The driving force behind the radically different Satellite form factors is their displays. The U845's display is right in line with the rest of the ultrabook crowd: a 14-inch, 1366 x 768 screen that looks good without being overwhelmingly impressive. The LED-backlit screen uses Toshiba's TruBrite technology, which the company claims means a brighter screen with less glare and better viewing angles. In practice, it's partly true: viewing angles are indeed excellent, and the U845's screen is indeed very bright. Glare, on the other hand, is every bit as problematic as I'm used to, and if anything is slightly worse — with a dark background the screen essentially becomes a mirror. Still, it's a perfectly adequate display, and because it's so bright it's still relatively usable outdoors.


The keyboards may be identical, but the trackpads are almost bizarrely different. Bizarre because Toshiba gets it right on one model, and horribly wrong on another. The U845W's trackpad is quite solid: my finger glides smoothly across the clickable metallic surface, two-finger scrolling works quite well, and palm rejection is good enough (though it can be a little too easy to accidentally click sometimes). On the spectrum of Windows PC trackpads, the U845W is certainly at the high end.