Toshiba Tecra M10 review

The Toshiba Tecra M10 laptop is a potential business laptop. Powerful, no doubt, but does its performance make up for its bulkiness?

What we like best

The 14.1 inch screen looks great, mainly thanks to its strong 1,400 x 900 pixel resolution – light conditions will have little effect on brightness and viewing angles, and the colours are decent, too.

There is both a touchpad (with vertical and horizontal scrolling enabled) and a touchstick, which is a nice addition, and the keyboard feels light yet solid, so typing is a smooth and pleasant experience. It’s spill-resistant to boot, so the Tecra M10 is a good option for those coffee-fuelled boardroom marathons.

A fingerprint scanner is just one of the security features included here: Toshiba’s own EasyGuard security suite covers pretty much everything from hard drive protection to identity.

What we like least

Whatever the users’ actual hard drive needs are, 250Gb is very little by today’s admittedly high standards. A lot of people we know have film collections that are half that, so unless it will be used mainly as an office laptop, the Toshiba Tecra M10 places some severe restrictions on the amount of data you can store on it without having to resort to an external hard drive.

Oddly enough, the lower-level models of the Toshiba Tecra M10 come with even smaller hard drives, at 160Gb and 120Gb respectively.

People are pretty much expecting USB 3.0 ports these days, but this laptop does ‘only’ come with four slower USB 2.0 ports. However, this is as much a point of criticism as it is a sign of how quickly the laptop industry moves – USB 3.0 for consumer computer has only been around for two years.

At around 2.5kg, the Tecra M10 isn’t the lightest laptop on the scene, so for long train rides or flights, you might want to take another laptop or netbook along, this one will weigh down your bag/suitcase considerably.