Toshiba Satellite U845W and U845 review

I can't help but imagine the design meeting at Toshiba HQ when the Satellite designs were finalized. I picture a heated debated ending in a stalemate between two totally different ideas, and with no resolution the company simply pursued both options. I can't think of any other way to explain that two ultrabooks called the U845 and the U845W would look so drastically different.

The U845 is clean and cohesive, with a brushed-metal silver aluminum lid and matching interior, plus a glossy black bezel around the screen. The bottom is a matte silver, with vents placed seemingly randomly around its surface; there's a matte silver stripe at the top of the lid as well. The U845 is sturdy and well-made, handsome without being particularly eye-catching. It's 0.78 inches thick, which is meatier than most ultrabooks, but since its edges taper sharply toward the bottom, it looks thinner than it is. At 3.9 pounds it's also fairly heavy for an ultrabook, but it'll definitely fit into your bag without racking up your medical bills.

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, but I can't say I noticed the difference between the two.

The port selection is roughly the same on both models, though the layout is different. Each has three USB ports lining the sides — one is USB 3.0 on the U845, and all three of the U845W's ports are 3.0. You'll also find 3.5mm headphone and microphone ports, a full-size Ethernet port, an SD slot, and an HDMI out on both computers.

There's one design touch that I hate equally on both models: there are stickers everywhere. The palm rest's six stickers are garish themselves, but they're not even the whole story; there's a big Skype sticker above the screen that I couldn't stop unintentionally looking at, plus four more on the bottom of the device. I was able to peel them all off — and the Satellite laptops became infinitely more attractive once I did — but it required a solid 25 minutes of digging my nails underneath adhesives that don't want to be removed.

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.

All of the above applies to the U845W, too, except its ultra-widescreen display is an inch wider and and a little over an inch shorter than the U845's. That works out to 5.75 inches tall and 13.25 inches wide, with a resolution of 1792 x 768 and a 21:9 aspect ratio — and the difference is huge, in good ways and in bad.

I tend to do a lot of work with two windows side-by-side — typically a research window next to whatever I'm writing — and for that the U845W is better-suited than any screen I've ever used. Hell, you can functionally have three windows side-by-side-by-side, which is pretty awesome.

The two Satellite models share the same keyboard, a roomy six-row affair with charcoal-colored chiclet keys. As functionality goes, Toshiba made all the right decisions: there are a number of function keys, and they're mapped to be the default actions so that you're not required to hit Fn first in order to change volume or brightness. The keys are backlit, too, so you can see them in the dark. The arrow keys are set slightly below the bottom row of the keyboard, making them easier to find with your fingers and to manipulate confidently. I even quite like the rounded, monospace font on the keys themselves, but I can't say it has much effect on the keyboard's usefulness.

The feature list is complete, but the actual typing experience falls a bit short. For one, the keys are just too small — they're slightly wider than they are tall, giving the whole set a slightly cramped feel. The keys are also quite shallow, occasionally leaving me wondering whether I'd sufficiently pressed the key or not. I eventually grew comfortable with its quirks, though I never typed as fast (or achieved as satisfying a clack-clack-clack) as I can on my MacBook Air.

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.

The U845 is on the absolute opposite end of that spectrum. Its matte surface is so sticky that your finger jumps and stutters across it; as your finger goes, so goes the pointer. That makes every gesture worse, too, since you'll accidentally scroll a full page as your fingers jump and drag. The trackpad is oddly fickle about right vs. left clicks, forcing you to exaggeratedly click only in the far corners to avoid any confusion. Even when you try, the surface is so resistant to clicks that you have to get some real elbow grease into it. There are plenty of bad trackpads out there, to be sure, and Toshiba's probably isn't the worst example, but it's infuriating to know that the company can build a good one and simply chose not to for the U845.

Ultrabooks have relatively strict requirements in their specs, so the fact that the Satellite ultrabooks perform well isn't surprising. They're both powered by an Intel Core i5-3317U processor, and 6GB of RAM. Both also have 500GB spinning hard drives, plus 32GB mSTA cache SSDs that help things like boot and resume times. That's right in the middle of the spec range for each device: the lowest prices ($749 for the U845 and $999 for the U845W) are for a Core i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. If you want an i7 processor, you'll have to get the U845W, and you'll have to pay $1,500 or more.

In practice, both are fast enough to be able to handle my daily routine with ease. My daily routine, by the way, is pretty intense: I typically have two dozen or so tabs open in Chrome, plus some combination of streaming music (via Rdio), some Photoshop, lots of slacking off and watching YouTube videos, and even some Netflix streaming (reruns of "The Office" provide great background noise). Doing all of those at the same time would cause the machines to stumble a bit, but for nearly every practical use case the Satellites did just fine.

Where they do run into trouble is with data-heavy processes that require the hard drive to whir to life; you will absolutely notice the difference between the Satellite models and an SSD-only drive. Thanks to the SSD cache drive, the machines still at least boot and resume quickly: both machines take 20 seconds to turn on and three seconds to wake up from sleep.

Thin and light are all well and good, but the best thing about the current spate of ultrabooks is their longevity — in a matter of months, I've become accustomed to far longer battery life from a laptop than ever before. In this new world of all-day battery life, the Satellites are only average: on The Verge Battery Test, the U845W lasted five hours and eight minutes, and the U845 held out nine minutes longer. (The test cycles through 100 websites and high-res images with brightness set to 65 percent.) Those numbers are stellar for laptops in general, but middle of the road for ultrabooks — and they're certainly not able to compete with the likes of the Dell XPS 14 or the Lenovo X230, which last up to two hours longer.

Neither heat nor noise present much of a problem for Toshiba's devices. The U845 only gets to a level I'd classify as "comfortably toasty," and though the U845W does get up to "my legs are sweating" it's not really a problem either. Each gets a little warm on the underside, particularly on the right, and a bit on the strip above the keyboard tray as well. Neither is particularly loud, either — even while playing games, I couldn't hear the fan unless I put my ear right up to the machine.