Toshiba Satellite Click 2 review
On the right track, but not there yet
"The Satellite Click 2 has dramatically improved performance and battery life but Toshiba has to rethink the terrible design."
- Unexpectedly impressive battery life
- Sharp and colorful display
- Runs image editors and light gaming handedly
- Ugly
- Heavy for an 13.3-inch laptop
- Uncomfortably awkward to use in nearly every way
Toshiba
is one of those companies that dares to experiment with the shape of
laptops. Just looking at the the company's small portfolio of
convertible laptops alone we've have the Satellite U920T with a screen that slides into place and the screen flipping Satellite Radius.
While many of these designs are novel, many of them have fallen to the
wayside being either too weird or unwieldy for its own brilliance.
Now Toshiba has just updated one of its only hybrid designs to get a second pass with the Toshiba Satellite Click 2. Sporting a detachable screen, the Click 2's splits into a thick 13.3-inch tablet and exceptionally thin keyboard base. Compared to the last model, Toshiba has refreshed its laptop-tablet with slightly news looks, and more importantly, a more powerful Intel Pentium processor. Now the question is if this is enough to fix the ills of the original Click or is this the Click 2 destined to fade into obscurity like so many hybrids before it.
While the Click 2 is rather top heavy, the hinge is strong enough to hold the screen in place - that is when it's sitting flat desk. Trying to type with the Click 2 sitting on my lap causes the display to wobble back and forth, though, not violently enough to cause the machine to tumble away from me.
Now Toshiba has just updated one of its only hybrid designs to get a second pass with the Toshiba Satellite Click 2. Sporting a detachable screen, the Click 2's splits into a thick 13.3-inch tablet and exceptionally thin keyboard base. Compared to the last model, Toshiba has refreshed its laptop-tablet with slightly news looks, and more importantly, a more powerful Intel Pentium processor. Now the question is if this is enough to fix the ills of the original Click or is this the Click 2 destined to fade into obscurity like so many hybrids before it.
Design
The Click 2 is an odd looking laptop. With a screen three as times thick as its keyboard base, it looks lopsided compared to your traditional notebook. A friend even asked me whether the laptop was upside after placing it on a desk.While the Click 2 is rather top heavy, the hinge is strong enough to hold the screen in place - that is when it's sitting flat desk. Trying to type with the Click 2 sitting on my lap causes the display to wobble back and forth, though, not violently enough to cause the machine to tumble away from me.
Compared with the previous Toshiba Click, this new model
is decidedly squarer especially on the bottom edge of the screen. This
is flat base allow the screen to stand up when its not sitting on its
base. Unfortunately the Click 2 does come with kickstand, so you'll
often look down at the screen, unless the you place the hybrid on a
particularly tall, neck-high surface.
It's also awkward to wrap your hands around the wide 13.3-inch tablet-laptop. Hold it horizontally and your hands are constantly split at a chest's width. Turn the device vertically and the tablet tips away from you as its edges dig into your palms. Toshiba has also made a poor design choice by placing the speakers on the backside of the screen exactly where you rest your fingers whilst holding the tablet.
One of the strangest things about the Click 2's design is the majority of its ports are located on the sides of the display including the mini-HDMI, SD card slot, and USB 2.0 port. It would have made a lot of sense to keep the inputs located on the laptop base, as you probably won't be plugging in a mouse or hooking it to a TV while your hands are busy holding the device and tapping on the touchscreen.
Here is the Toshiba Satellite Click 2 configuration given to reviewsense
The Lenovo Yoga 2 11 for also goes for an affordable $499 (about £310, AU$569) on Amazon as well. The Lenovo hybrid also matches the Toshiba with the same Pentium N3530 CPU and 8GB of RAM, plus the a little speed boost thanks to the 500GB hybrid drive with an 8GB SSD cache. Asus Transformer Book TX300 by comparison is in a whole other class of premium; equipped with a Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7 3517U processor and a 128GB SSD on top of its 500GB hard drive, this suave aluminum hybrid can be had for $1,099 at TigerDirect (about £683, AU$1,254).
Performance
It's also awkward to wrap your hands around the wide 13.3-inch tablet-laptop. Hold it horizontally and your hands are constantly split at a chest's width. Turn the device vertically and the tablet tips away from you as its edges dig into your palms. Toshiba has also made a poor design choice by placing the speakers on the backside of the screen exactly where you rest your fingers whilst holding the tablet.
One of the strangest things about the Click 2's design is the majority of its ports are located on the sides of the display including the mini-HDMI, SD card slot, and USB 2.0 port. It would have made a lot of sense to keep the inputs located on the laptop base, as you probably won't be plugging in a mouse or hooking it to a TV while your hands are busy holding the device and tapping on the touchscreen.
Specifications
Weighing in at 4.85 pounds, the Click 2 is one of the heaviest convertible laptops even compared to equally sized, 4.2 pound Asus Transformer Book TX300. The Asus is even thinner measuring 13.30 x 9.40 x 1 inches while the Toshiba's dimensions are 9.10 x 13 x 1 inches. Unsurprisingly the 11.6-inch Lenovo Yoga 2 11 is the smallest hybrid, measuring 11.7 x 8.12 x 0.67 inches and weighing 3.19 pounds.Here is the Toshiba Satellite Click 2 configuration given to reviewsense
Spec Sheet
- CPU: 2.16GHz Intel Pentium N3530 Processor (2MB cache, up to 2.58 GHz with Turbo Boost)
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics
- RAM: 4GB DDR3L 1600MHz
- Screen: 13.3-inch 1366x768 LED Backlit 10-point Touchscreen IPS Display
- Storage: 500GB HDD (5400rpm, Serial ATA)
- Ports:1 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0, mini-HDMI, headphone and microphone combo jack, Kingston lock, AC adapter, SD card slot
- Connectivity: Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160 with Bluetooth 4.0
- Camera: HD 720p webcam
- Weight: 4.85 pounds
- Size: 9.10 x 13 x 1 inches (W x D x H)
The Lenovo Yoga 2 11 for also goes for an affordable $499 (about £310, AU$569) on Amazon as well. The Lenovo hybrid also matches the Toshiba with the same Pentium N3530 CPU and 8GB of RAM, plus the a little speed boost thanks to the 500GB hybrid drive with an 8GB SSD cache. Asus Transformer Book TX300 by comparison is in a whole other class of premium; equipped with a Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7 3517U processor and a 128GB SSD on top of its 500GB hard drive, this suave aluminum hybrid can be had for $1,099 at TigerDirect (about £683, AU$1,254).
Performance
With a Pentium processor tucked under the Click 2's thick
display we weren't expecting much performance at all. In fact, the
laptop chugged heavily when I patched in all the Windows 8.1 updates.
However, once I got the laptop running up to speed with the latest
software, it was smooth sailing from there. The hybrid proved to be
spunky and did a fair job of running Adobe Lightroom as well as playing
Hearthstone on medium settings. As ever, here's how the Click 2 fared in
our usual battery of benchmark tests.
The Click 2 was also able to see me through a full day of working on documents while streaming music, editing photos in Lightroom, streaming the last half of GI Joe Retribution, and two rounds of Hearthstone. All of this was done with the screen set to a quarter screen brightness and speakers set to 20 and the laptop still lasted 6 hours and 29 minutes.
Keep in mind this excellent battery life is coming from an budget hybrid. This extended run time is something we'd more expect from an energy sipping Chromebook or meticulously engineered ultrabook. The only competitor that came close to matching the Click 2's battery life was the Asus TX300, which lasted a shorter 5 hours and 6 minutes on the PCMark 8 battery test.
Verdict
Benchmarks
- 3DMark: Ice Storm: 20,652; Cloud Gate: 1,583; Fire Strike: DNF
- Cinebench CPU: 153 points; Graphics: 6.65 fps,
- PCMark 8 (Home Test): 1,432 points
- PCMark 8 Battery Life: 5 hours and 31 minutes
Ready for the long haul
Where the Click 2 lacks in performance it makes up for with astonishly good battery life. Thanks to the low-power Intel Pentium N3530 processor plus a fanless design, the 13.3-inch laptop was able to last a respectable 5 hours and 31 minutes on our PCMark 8 battery test.The Click 2 was also able to see me through a full day of working on documents while streaming music, editing photos in Lightroom, streaming the last half of GI Joe Retribution, and two rounds of Hearthstone. All of this was done with the screen set to a quarter screen brightness and speakers set to 20 and the laptop still lasted 6 hours and 29 minutes.
Keep in mind this excellent battery life is coming from an budget hybrid. This extended run time is something we'd more expect from an energy sipping Chromebook or meticulously engineered ultrabook. The only competitor that came close to matching the Click 2's battery life was the Asus TX300, which lasted a shorter 5 hours and 6 minutes on the PCMark 8 battery test.
Excellent display, for the price
Another pleasant surprise was the Click 2 excellent display panel. Equipped with an IPS panel, the laptop's display presents some very good colors. It also renders some actual blacks, whereas many TN panel-equipped machines would produce washed out grays. That said you can't expect perfection with a budget price and the Click 2 lacks a fair amount of contrast, which causes most detail in the shadows to be lost to dark pixels. It's decent enough to watch streaming movies and edit your vacation pictures with, but I wouldn't suggest doing any professional photoshopping on this display.Bundled software
The Toshiba Click 2 comes with an infuriating amount of bloatware preloaded. 15 items in total, but here's the most important software you'll want to keep around.- DTS Sound - Well don't delete your sound system software.
- Hard disc recovery - In case of accidental spills this software will hopefully help you restore your data.
- Intel® Wireless Display - Share your display to another device wirelessly.
- TOSHIBA Maintenance Utility - Just in case you need to troubleshoot your machine
The Click 2 is definitely not a stunner from Toshiba, but
it's a big improvement from the original convertible hybrid. Thanks to a
more capable Pentium processor I never ran into any of the performance
issues on the original Click and its AMD CPU. What's more, the new Intel
chip also seems to have fixed the short battery life, which also
plagued the Click 2's predecessor.
Recently Microsoft and its computer manufacturing partners have been in search of affordable, power-efficient Windows 8.1 laptops to compete with Chromebooks and the Click 2 offers a glimpse of that future could be. Plus the screen detaches to become a tablet.
With the Click 3 I can only hope Toshiba will go back to the drawing board to create a slimmer, lighter and easier to hold laptop hybrid. Once it does that, Toshiba could have a very hot convertible machine on its hands.
We liked
Going Intel was a boon for the Click 2. Not only has the new chipset dramatically improved the performance of this hybrid laptop, it's also drastically extended the battery life to over six hours. Toshiba hasn't sacrificed processing horsepower for more power sipping performance either. I was easily able to run all of my typical, resource intensive applications without any hiccups. The great screen, meanwhile, is just an extra bit of icing to go with the Click 2 surprisingly excellent performance.Recently Microsoft and its computer manufacturing partners have been in search of affordable, power-efficient Windows 8.1 laptops to compete with Chromebooks and the Click 2 offers a glimpse of that future could be. Plus the screen detaches to become a tablet.
We disliked
While the Click 2 has fixed many of the ills that plagued its predecessor, Toshiba's hybrid is still far from being perfect. The most glaring flaw of the Click 2 is its absolutely dreadful design. It's shape is lopsided making it just as awkward to balance on your lap as it is unwieldy to hold. The design as a whole just seems backwards and while that might its characteristic signature, it's really not working here Toshiba.Final verdict
The Click 2 is a step in the right direction and Toshiba has improved greatly from the originally Click, which in general was a borked machine in every way. Still it's not a notebook I would easily recommend, especially when the Lenovo Yoga 2 11 has can be had for the same affordable price. Plus the two machines share very similar specs. Sure you're sacrificing some screen real estate, but Lenovo has nailed its hybrid design and a 11.6-inch tablet might actually be more comfortable in your hands.With the Click 3 I can only hope Toshiba will go back to the drawing board to create a slimmer, lighter and easier to hold laptop hybrid. Once it does that, Toshiba could have a very hot convertible machine on its hands.
source:-Toshiba Satellite Click 2 review