First looks: Toshiba Satellite P500

The Toshiba Satellite P500 is a big laptop. Not a-little-larger-than-a-typical-laptop big, more size-of-the-universe big. Take a look at the photo if you don’t believe me: this is a kind and perfectly normal-sized lady at the Toshiba booth at IFA Berlin, yet it dwarfs her. “It’s not funny,” she said, having held the laptop for 30 seconds as I fiddled with the camera, “this laptop is heavy.” That’s also undeniably true, but then the Satellite P500 wasn’t built to be carried between home and office. This is a machine designed to entertain, and Toshiba packs in all the hi-tech goodies you can think of to make it a pleasure to use. Heading the list of entertainment partners is Blu-ray, which is included in the top-end model. It’s a writer as well as a reader, but sadly I couldn’t test it on the stand as the mix of early drivers and software wasn’t working (the P500 isn’t due for release until October at the earliest). I could test the rather beautiful looking Harman Kardon speakers, which on first listen – at a busy stand, note – lived up to Toshiba’s description as “delicious”. You could pick out the detail and the bass, and they didn’t distort at volume either. The 18.4in screen is equally delicious, as it should be, with the 1,680 x 945 screen I was admiring a pleasure to gaze upon. The multi-touch keyboard also worked well enough within what appears to be quite a basic remit of zooming in and out, though I’ll hold judgement on both this and the keyboard before using them in anger. We covered the rest of the known spec in our news story about the P500, but suffice to say that whatever you decide to use this laptop for – gaming, video editing, photo editing – a combination of Intel’s fastest laptop processors and Nvidia’s fastest graphics mean it should perform with some aplomb. Add in support for up to 8GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage, courtesy of two hard disk bays, and the P500 lives up to its desktop replacement description. We look forward to getting it into our Labs for a full test as soon as possible! Source: PC Pro