The trackpad's buttons, as you'll see from the pictures, are chrome-look plastic and form part of a band that runs around the edge of the laptop's base section. The two mouse buttons are formed from a single piece of plastic pivoted at the centre, and we found that not having a way to differentiate the left- and right-click keys by touch an annoyance. Too often, while looking at the screen, we'd hit the middle of the bar and not trigger a click. The buttons' actions are a little too heavy for us.
Ethernet, USB and audio on one side...
The trackpad does the basic multi-touch gesture of pinch-to-zoom, and you can use your finger to track a spiral and so rotate pictures, but there's no two-finger scrolling, just pre-determined scroll trigger zones.
The keyboard's a wee bit spongy too, but since there's very little flex, we'll give it out thumbs up.
Unlike the 1810TZ, the T110 has Bluetooth on board, but in most other respects the two machines' hardware essentials are the same. Both have 802.11n Wi-Fi, a VGA port, three USB 2.0 connectors - which can be set to provide power when the laptop's sleeping - a multi-format memory card slot and and HDMI port. They have Intel's GMA 4500MHD graphics core built into their chipset to drive both screen and HDMI.
While the Acer has Gigabit Ethernet, the Toshiba is limited to a netbook-like 100Mb/s. Personally, we'd rather have faster wired networking than Bluetooth, but you pays your money, and we'll pay ours.
There's 3GB of 800MHz DDR 3 memory on board, with the T110's two SO-DIMM slots taken up with memory cards. Both are easily accessible through a hatch in the base of the laptop, as is the 2.5in Sata hard drive, though its door is held down not with Philips screws but hex-headed ones.
... plus VGA, HDMI, USB and memory card slot on the other
Like the 1810TZ, the T100 comes with a big battery - 61Wh, in this case. It's not as well integrated into the casing as the Acer's power pack is, but it doesn't bulge excessively out of the back or the base, either. But it brings the T110's maximum thickness to 38mm to the Acer's 30mm. That 8mm may not seem much on paper but it made the Toshiba notebook feel by far the chunkier of the two. It's also wider and deeper.
COMMENTS
Silly Person
It's not the CPU that's hobbling the system, it's the software. Try running an efficient O/S with efficient software and you can get the system screaming.
habeeb it
I've had my HP TC4200 down to about that level idling after some futzing of the deep-end CPU and power management settings. Granted, that was with the hard disk stopped and the screen turned off, but only using a relatively standard Mobile Pentium 740 CPU and early-gen Centrino chipset. 5+ hours of light browsing in a darkened room (dim backlight setting) off a 40-something battery when it was fresh. Doesn't last quite so well now of course.
Translate that to something with an LED instead of fluoro / CC backlight, Atom processor (or low-end Cele... (*spit*) ...ron like this) and various improvements in the fields of chipset and disk, and I can't see why it's even unusual these days (bit sad that's so, really?). I'd hope to get something with 6 hours out of my same compact 40-blah battery, medium to full screen brightness and still with better all round performance and response, for less money. I'm skeptical that a 1.3ghz single-core Celeron of any flavour can outcompete even my ageing chip (itself SC but probably with better cache/memory access/instruction set/overall architecture), but I'd be happy to give them a fair like-for-like benchmarking just in case.
Key-O-Bard: that certainly is a USP...
...a singer with DRM perhaps?? Now...warez my coat...
Apologies *blush*
Get a Dell Inspiron 13z
Dual core 1.3Ghz, 4GB DDR3, 320GB 7200rpm HDD, Win7 64bit, Geforce 105M GPU, DVD drive, 8cell 8hours+ battery, decent keyobard and trackpad.
Works a treat.
Not so much "had me at hello", but..
..more lost me at "Intel's GMA 4500MHD".
