Toshiba Qosmio X770 review

The Toshiba Qosmio X770 is a bit of a beast. Its grey-and-red design, hefty specs and 17.3 inch screen disqualify it from any portability awards, but its brief lies elsewhere.

What we like best

The Qosmio X770 displays colours superbly (and, most importantly, brightly), despite having a glossy screen. There’s also a Blu-ray Disc drive and 3D glasses to put this laptop firmly in the entertainment camp.

3D is a total gimmick as far as we’re concerned, but that only goes for the film industry – for gamers, 3D is, on average, a great invention. The Qosmio comes with NVIDIA’s 3D vision pre-installed, meaning you can sit down and watch Avatar straight away if that’s your bag.

But you should know that playing games is what this thing was built for. And thanks to its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M graphics card, the Qosmio X770 is a very good gaming laptop – the backlit keyboard feels solid, with widely spaced keys that will come in handy during a lot of action games.

All the great visual capabilities would count for little without decent speakers, and Toshiba have taken care to pack this laptop with Harmon Kardon Stereo Speakers, which deliver enough oomph so as not to send you running to your nearest hi-fi store as soon as you launch iTunes.

Powering the whole apparatus is a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, coupled with a whopping 8Gb of RAM. You can’t really get more hefty than that these days, and as a result, everyday applications run as fluidly as an oiled windmill in a tornado.

What we like least

The 3D glasses that come with the Toshiba Qosmio X770 are useful but very cumbersome, especially for people who wear actual glasses.

This isn’t a laptop to be taken around – it feels to flimsy and plasticy and won’t fit in any normal-sized bag either. It weighs in at a heavyweight 3.4kg, which is more than you would want to carry around on a normal basis. The Toshiba Qosmio X770 belongs on your desk.

This is also highlighted by the laughable battery life, which, under heavy usage, lasts all of 30 minutes.