Otaku Gadgets

Prices of electronic gadgets are falling left and right. Laptops are more affordable than ever but that’s only because the average spending power has also gone south. Nonetheless, people still need laptops to get their work done on the move and hence laptops will keep on selling.

If you are looking for a laptop under $500 now, you are likely to find a lot of netbooks and good ones at that too. However, if you filter out the netbooks you will see that there are a myriad of entry-level laptops vying for your attention. It is amongst this collection that you will find the Toshiba Satellite L505D-S5965. No, I don’t know either why they have such cryptic alphanumeric codes as their names.

The laptop has features that are sure to make you look… somewhere else. But its punch line is in the price tag. At $450, you might mistake it for a netbook if you don’t look closely at the specifications.

The core specifications are not bad; do not get me wrong here. You will be getting a dual-core AMD Athlon X2 processor for this price, along with 3 gigabytes of RAM and 250 Gigabytes of hard drive space. That is not too bad for this price because it will let you accomplish everything you might need to do on a daily basis with a good amount of multitasking.

The TFT-LCD screen supports a display of 1366×768, which is getting increasingly common in laptops these days. The videos look good on the screen, it is comfortably bright and the texts look well defined. Over all, it is a good screen.

The keyboard on the L505D has nicely tapered keys and a full numeric keypad. That last bit will surely come in handy for a lot of people. One weird thing about the touch pad is that it is flush with the surface and is of the same color and finish. Hence, it sometimes blends in the rest of the surface. Thankfully, the buttons show you where it is.

There’s also a DVD burner with the L505D. So far, we are looking at a really good configuration here and the ATI Mobility Radeon 3100 with a 256MB memory just makes the entire package that much better. It adds casual gaming to the tally of things you can do with this laptop.

So for those who are looking for super cheap mobile computing, this is where you stop reading and go make that purchase. Of course, do understand that beyond this point, things start going downhill for this Toshiba Satellite series notebook.

Let’s start with the looks – you are probably not going to like how it looks. This laptop is definitely on the bulkier side of things. If you are planning to haul it around everywhere, do have a hefty carrying bag around. With a slew of affordable and sleek netbooks and notebooks in the market, this one really looks like it could use some designer love. There are users out there who really don’t care about how a laptop looks, so this can be overlooked I suppose.

As we move on to features, things begin get to worse. It has quite a few things missing and a webcam tops the list. I do understand that it must’ve been a cost saving measure but even ultra-cheap netbooks have a webcam these days. It certainly would not have been too expensive for Toshiba to throw in one.

There is no Bluetooth either. So you have to get down to plugging your phone in via USB to sync and do data transfers between the phone and the laptop. No Bluetooth also means you cannot wirelessly share your phone’s Internet connection with the L505D. Of course, you can do the same with WLAN enabled phones but it is not a common feature on basic phones. You can also buy a Bluetooth USB dongle for just $15 or so extra.

It does have Wi-Fi but it is 802.11b/g while most other laptops are also 802.11n and even 802.11a compliant. This should not be much of a deterrent save the occasional hiccup.

When it comes to ports, Toshiba has been really tight handed. The L505D has only 2 USB 2.0 ports. So once you have a Bluetooth dongle and a mobile Internet dongle attached to the notebook, you are out of ports. Save the one solitary USB port that also acts as an eSATA port.

Thankfully, the laptop has a VGA port for connecting the L505D to your projector or similar. There is also a phone modem port (RJ-11) that is rarely in use these days. However, some business people might still have some use for it. It has a 10Base-T/100Base-TX RJ-45 port supporting Fast Ethernet. There are two 3.5 mm ports, one for output (headphones, laptop speakers, etc) and the other for input (microphone, line in).

There is also a multi-in-one card reader, which can act as secondary storage.

And that is where, ladies and gentlemen, the list of ports ends on the L505D. We certainly would’ve liked a few more. At least a third, distinct USB port apart from USB/eSATA combo. I would’ve really liked to say that all the bad news ends there but sadly I cannot.

Toshiba tops off the entire fiasco by giving you a 6-cell battery that gives you an estimated battery-life of 2.2 hours and we all know that real life figures are usually lower by quite a bit. So this is where I really start to question what the folks over at Toshiba were thinking when they made the L505D.

This low battery issue is one thing I never quite get – why make a portable device less portable by giving it a short battery life? All that does is turn away customers who will spend that extra bit of money to get something with a better battery life.

My end verdict is this – buy this if you are on a really tight budget or want a killer bargain for a laptop that you are not going to carry around much. It is a good combination of price and core power that might appeal to budget buyers. However, if your laptop usage goes beyond the basic things and you have a plethora of devices that you use with your laptop, you are better off with something else. Especially if you are loathe to run recharge the laptop after only 90 minutes of usage.

It comes bundled with a 1 year limited warranty and Windows Vista. Some third party sellers are also offering a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it is finally released. This is a fixed specifications notebook and offers no customizability. It is already available in stores.

More: Amazon

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