Not a lot of old tosh: the new Toshiba NB100 Netbook revealed

By Davey Winder
Thursday, 18 September 2008 14:57

Home IT

It was only ever a matter of time before Toshiba stripped off and jumped in the rapidly crowding Netbook pool. That time is now, but what sort of a splash will the Toshiba NB100 make?

Although some will argue that the Psion Netbook was the first of the sub-sub-notebook breed, you can ignore them and jump straight to the ASUS Eee PC if you want to meet and greet the machine that made the market.

And, for that matter, flooded it with model after model after model. With Dell and Acer doing very nicely thank you with their own Netbooks, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the likes of Toshiba started to play the small, cheap computer game.

So it is that today we have the announcement that Toshiba Computer Systems will be selling the NB100, the first Tosh badged Netbook, from October.

Given that Netbooks are usually sold off the back of that 'small and cheap' promise, how does that fit with Toshiba brand which, to be fair, has traditionally promised no such thing?

Will the NB100 is certainly small. Forget the ever creeping towards a proper sub-notebook and beyond size that seems to be the fashion for ASUS, Dell and others these days, the NB100 is strictly a small-screen star: 8.9 inches of TruBrite 1024x600 display in fact.

Some might say forget, for the moment at least, the cheap bit as well. Mainly because Toshiba is not officially saying how much the NB100 is going to cost.

However, a little bird tweets in our direction that in the region of UKP £270 is about right. Which would plop it right at the top end of the current 8.9 inch Netbook pool. We are assuming, of course, that this price relates to a Windows machine with a big hard drive.

So what is the real selling point here? How are Toshiba going to differentiate themselves from the Netbook competition? The specs all sound remarkably familiar to anyone who has looked at buying Netbook recently:

An Atom N270 CPU, a Linux Ubuntu 8.04 version, a Windows XP Home version, WiFi, Ethernet, USB x3, 0.3MP webcam, up to 120GB hard drive storage, middling battery life of around 3.5 hours, weight in the 1 kilo area and a choice of colours including gold, silver and black.

What Toshiba is promising to do differently, however, can be summed up in two words: Build Quality. "Build-quality is of a premium standard" Toshiba says "providing users with resolute and portable netbook."

Given the price, and the state of the market already, he had better be right.