Toshiba Libretto W100 review: First look

With the more powerful processor and two screens to drive, battery life is only three to four hours. This is the kind of PC you might want to carry with you frequently but use for half an hour at a time. That’s the way smartphones are often used but as Toshiba emphasises repeatedly, this is meant to be a full PC – just one you can put in your pocket. Well, in some pockets anyway.

If you think of it as a Filofax, the slightly chunky case seems more reasonable and while you will need a large pocket to fit it in (we fitted it in both the jacket pocket of a man’s suit and the back pocket on a pair of jeans), at only 819g it isn’t as heavy as you’d expect.

The twin screens give you a lot of options, from a standard netbook to a UMPC style with a split keyboard, to a large divided screen to the side-by-side book mode.

Toshiba’s LifeSpace software works very well as a way of launching apps and clipping information and the touch support in Windows 7 means you can scroll, swipe, pinch, zoom and rotate your way through windows. The book mode ought to be more interesting – it’s useful for putting documents and spreadsheets side by side, but until Toshiba persuades someone to write an ebook reader that spreads pages neatly across both screens the W100 won’t come into its own.

And it’s disappointing that there’s no pen support at all, so you can’t scribble a note into OneNote, make a sketch or highlight passages in a book unless your fingers are exceptionally nimble.