Toshiba Tecra A11 review: First look

Toshiba may hit the headlines with its multi-touch enabled laptop, but as far as business customers are concerned its new Tecra models will be of rather more interest. Two new models have been announced – the 14in Tecra M11 and the 15.4in display equipped A11.

The former will be available in March, while the A11 is available immediately for around £600 ex VAT, and this is what we’re looking at right now.

The first thing we noted when picking up the A11 is that it feels surprisingly light in the hand for a notebook of this size – though it actually weighs in at 2.5Kg. It doesn’t feel flimsy though, and it certainly seems to match up to Toshiba’s reputation for impressive build quality.

To get straight to what is perhaps its key feature, the A11 is powered by an Intel Core i3 processor, an M330 running at 2.13GHz. This means we expect it to scream along even compared to high end Core 2 processors, though a full review with benchmarks will confirm this.

Windows 7 Professional certainly felt impressively lively, but we were disappointed that only the 32-bit version was supplied, along with just 2GB of memory.

The 15.4in display makes things nice and large on screen especially with the modest 1,366 x 768 resolution. This means we could not recommend this for say, detailed Excel work but then you could take advantage of either the VGA out at the rear or the DisplayPort output on the left hand side. One issue though is that this is a mini-version, so you’ll need to use an adaptor to connect.

If you do have to stare at the screen all day, a positive is that it uses a regular non-glare screen. While that means it lacks colour vividness, it's also much easier on the eyes over extended periods.