Toshiba M200: first look

I got my M200 yesterday, courtesy of CDW. I didn’t get a chance to play with it much, and I forgot the AC adapter in Redmond, so my time with it has been limited. However, I’ve used it enough to form a few first impressions:

• The screen is not as sharp or crisp as the screen on my T30 or T40, nor is it as sharp as the 1024×768 screen on my old PowerBook G3. Compounding the problem, Toshiba ships the unit with a default wallpaper with lots of light colors and subtle gradations that a) makes the screen look worse and b) is ugly in se. Having said that, the extra resolution is quite nice.
• The keyboard has an excellent, snappy feel to it. Some of the key arrangements are odd (e.g. the Fn and Ctrl keys are reversed relative to the Thinkpads, and the tilde is next to the space bar instead of up next to the 1). This will take some getting used to.
• The built-in 802.11b has a hardware on/off switch– a little slider on the left-hand side of the case. Nice feature for those of us who travel on airplanes.
• Perceived speed is quite good; even though this machine has a Pentium M 1.5 and my Thinkpad has a 1.6 (with more RAM), it boots faster.
• Toshiba installs a bunch of crap on the default desktop (including demo versions of TabletPlanner and Zinio, the Office XP Tablet Pack, etc). However, they also include the full version of OneNote, WinDVD, and a drag-and-drop CD burning tool (these last two are superfluous for me since this machine doesn’t have an optical drive). IT does make the desktop look awfully cluttered.
• There are three little rubber feet at the frontmost edge of the palmrest. These are obviously here to keep screen marks off, which is nice. IBM solves this problem by recessing the screen into a frame that acts as a standoff; Apple doesn’t attempt to solve it (bah). It’s too early to tell if the feet will annoy me after typing.

I’m going to use this machine to write the last chapter of my book (once, that is, the AC adapter arrives), so I should be able to log some serious hours on it for the next two weeks. More later.