Hands-on with Toshiba's U845t touchscreen ultrabook

Toshiba piqued our curiosity when it announced its affordable U845t ultrabook with a touchscreen display, so we decided to check out the laptop to see if the company was onto something. Unfortunately, adding a touchscreen doesn’t automatically equal a great experience — the fundamentals of the U845t miss the mark. Touch sensitivity on the panel was good, and we didn’t have any problems navigating through Windows 8. The quality of the 14-inch 1366 x 768 display is definitely lacking, though, as poor viewing angles and questionable colors were fully present and accounted for. The touchpad also proved to be extremely frustrating to use — at least people will have the fallback option of the touchscreen. The keyboard, meanwhile, seems decent, even if the keys were a little shallow for our tastes.

Otherwise this is a fairly standard ultrabook, equipped with an Ivy Bridge Core i3 or Core i5 processor, a 500GB hard drive with a 32GB SSD cache, and up to 6GB of memory. Pricing is set at $799.99, and Toshiba says the ultrabook is on track of a March 10th release.

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