A ‘cloudbook’ at an enticingly low price
As we mentioned recently (see our Toshiba Satellite Click Mini review): the netbook is back. Actually it never really went away, but it was so dull we all ignored it for a few years. Let’s face it, the combination of a scaled-down laptop chassis, a tiny screen and an underpowered processor is not the stuff dreams are made of. Nobody, upon winning the lottery, immediately thought: ‘Now I can get that netbook!’
Here’s one, though, that’s at least trying to impress. Finished in a classy hairline-grooved matt black, the C40 – which runs Windows 8.1 – has a larger screen than your average netbook; at 14 inches it’s practically a proper laptop. You don’t get any extra pixels, mind, just bigger ones, so the 1366x768-pixel display looks relatively coarse, and you still don’t have enough resolution to use two windows comfortably side-by-side, unless one of them is something basic and preferably vertical, such as Twitter.
Looking on the bright side, text and icons don’t look small and fiddly. The screen is glossy, which doesn’t enhance its bogstandard colour reproduction, but does mean it’s as likely to show you your own reflection as the spreadsheet you’re working on. A matt screen would make a lot more sense for this kind of computer.
This isn’t a touchscreen PC, so there’s a built-in touchpad to move the cursor and carry out basic multi-touch gestures like two-finger scrolling. It worked fine for us. The keyboard is full-size – because it isn’t limited by the dimensions of a small screen – and feels fine to type on. Along the sides you’ll find one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports for peripherals, an HDMI socket to connect an external monitor, and an SD card reader. Wi-Fi is built in, although it’s only of the single-band 802.11n variety, not the faster 802.11ac, and there’s no Ethernet port for wired networking, although that’s no surprise on a machine designed to be highly portable.
Since the whole point is that they’re designed to be cheap, netbooks traditionally have processor chips that make a radiator thermostat look like the Met Office’s new Cray supercomputer. Sure enough, the C40’s 1.6GHz Celeron, with integrated Intel HD Graphics, is not fast. Yes, it can run basic programs and load web pages. But where we’d usually test a system’s limits by seeing how high we could push the settings in advanced 3D games, here it’s more about trying to apply filters to a few photos and realising we have to come back after a coffee.
Although its non-upgradable 2GB of memory is small, the C40 is quite capable of running software like Microsoft Office. Sadly, unlike rivals, it doesn’t come with Office: you’re left to shell out for your own Office 365 subscription or pick a free alternative such as LibreOffice.
Don’t think you can get a fully featured laptop for £200. This is still definitely a netbook, but one with a comfortably proportioned screen and keyboard and no major flaws. Just keep in mind that with only 32GB of storage, the expectation is that you keep most of your work ‘in the cloud’ that is, on the internet – so it’s more like a cloudbook than a netbook. You can of course double this storage via the SD card slot for under a tenner.
Celeron may be no great shakes as a performer, but it makes up for that by preserving your battery. Toshiba quotes the time between charges as ‘up to’ six hours 45 minutes. We played videos for half an hour longer than that, and in less media-intensive tasks the battery lasted even longer. Although it‘s on the large side, it’s still reasonably light, and overall this makes it a great choice if portability is your main concern.
VERDICT
For £200, it’s hard to fault the C40’s style and quality.
SPECIFICATIONS
1.6GHz Intel Celeron N3050 dual-core processor • 2GB memory • 32GB SSD • Intel HD Graphics • 14in 1366x768-pixel screen • 720p HD webcam • 802.11n Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4 • Windows 8.1 (free upgrade to Windows 10) • 23x344x245mm (HxWxD) • 1.7kg • One-year warranty