Toshiba Satellite T130

Review If Toshiba's svelte Satellite T110 was too small for you, the next model up, the T130, might not be. Both are part of the company's "thin, light and mobile" line-up, but while the T110 - reviewed here - is an 11.6in laptop that likes look down on netbooks, its bigger sibling is a 13.3in notebook that promises to be more fleet of foot than more mainstream machines.

Toshiba's Satellite T130: not quite as skinny as the photos suggest

And it succeeds. It's been designed to appear as lean as possible in much the same way the MacBook Air - reviewed here - has, hiding its girth well away from the edges so as to appear nice and skinny. Girth there is, mainly thanks to the battery, which bulges out from the base, but not so as to impede the laptop's portability.

Like the Air, the T130 dispenses with an optical drive and makes use of ultra-low voltage processors, ranging from the feeble Pentium SU2700 and Core 2 Solo SU3500 - single-core stuck-in-the-muds both - to the more sprightly, dual-core Pentium SU4100 and Core 2 Duo SU7300, which is the one we have here.

Integrated graphics are standard across the line: Intel's GMA 4500MHD doing the honours - if you can use that word with a graphics core that delivers a 3DMark06 score of just 590. So no serious gaming on this boy, but it plays 1080p HD video with no difficulty.

The clean lines and carbon-fibre styling make for a natty notebook

Toshiba is a past master at playing the game of mixing and matching components to hit price points, so while some models, like the review unit, come with 3GB of memory, others have 4GB, and not necessarily the ones with the better CPUs. Ditto, some have 320GB hard drives, while others make do with 250GB.