Toshiba Satellite L15W-B1302 Radius 11 Review

Looking for an inexpensive laptop that doubles as a tablet? The Satellite Radius 11, on sale exclusively at Best Buy, is Toshiba’s entry in the growing category of small, inexpensive convertible-hybrid laptops similar in design to the Lenovo Yoga line. Although it’s a decent performer and an affordable option among multimode laptops, there are plenty of other capable laptop and tablet hybrids to choose from.

DESIGN

Like other two-in-one designs, the Radius 11 offers both laptop and tablet functionality. Instead of a detachable docking tablet, the laptop hinge lets the screen be folded back into other positions: Laptop, Tablet, Tabletop (folded flat), Presentation (propped up like a tent), and Audience (touch screen shown with keyboard folded back as a base). Lenovo was there first with the dual-hinge design, but we’ve also seen the HP Pavilion 11t-n000 x360 and Dell XPS 11 doing their best interpretations in this now-crowded category.

When closed, the Radius 11 measures 0.86 by 11.4 by 7.8 inches (HWD), and weighs 2.9 pounds. The 11-inch form factor works well as both a highly portable laptop and a tablet that can easily be carried and used on the go. The small size and sleek design owe a lot to the Intel Celeron N2840 processor inside, which doesn’t require

the same sort of cooling and battery power as a Core i3 or Core i5 laptop CPU. Intel has recently introduced the much more capable Intel Core M (seen recently in the

Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro), which offers better performance with the same sort of energy efficiency and fanless cooling, but it’s not something you’re likely to see in this

price range.

The 11.6-inch screen works for both laptop and tablet use. Its 1,366-by-768 resolution isn’t anything special, but the display is reasonably bright and clear, with ten- finger touch support and edge-to-edge glass. The laptop keyboard has a basic chiclet-style design, with square black keys but no backlight, so using the keyboard in a

dimly lit environment might be a pain. When you fold back the display, the keyboard is automatically disengaged and automatic screen rotation is turned on. The accompanying touchpad is squarely centered in the palm rest; it has the multitouch gesture support you’ll want for Windows 8, as well as separate clickable right and left buttons.

FEATURES

Past its multimode design, the Radius 11 has a fairly standard feature set, with the ports located along both sides of the laptop chassis. On the right are a USB 2.0 port and a headset jack, along with a Kensington lock slot and physical buttons for volume control. On the left are a full-size HDMI-out port, a USB 3.0 port, and an SD card slot, along with a power connector and an On/Off button. Other features on the system include 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and WiDi wireless video streaming.

For storage the Radius 11 boasts a 500GB hard drive, which is fairly standard for the class (if much higher capacity than the 64GB solid-state drives offered in tablets like the Acer Aspire Switch 10 and the Asus Transformer Book T100TA). With so much space, Toshiba doesn’t hold back on the preinstalled software. There are 30-day trials of McAfee Live Safe 2014 and Microsoft Office 365, as well as free services such as Adobe Reader, Google Drive, Amazon Kindle reader, and others. Then there are retail apps (Amazon, eBay), entertainment apps (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify, iHeart Radio), and samples of about a dozen games from WildTangent. Toshiba also throws in several branded apps, including App Place, Book Place, Media Player by sMedio Truelink+, and more utilities for system recovery, password management, and power management. Toshiba covers the Radius 11 with a one-year warranty.

PERFORMANCE AND CONCLUSIONS

With its Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM, the Satellite Radius 11 didn’t dazzle us with its performance. It’s functional, but noticeably slow, even when performing basic tasks such as opening a new browser tab. It will do for typing up papers or checking email and Facebook, but most anything else will be laggy.

In PCMark 8, the Radius 11 scored 1,627, ahead of both the Acer E3-111-C1BW laptop (1,605) and the Acer Switch 10 detachable-hybrid tablet (1,576). In Photoshop, the Radius 11 was actually faster (13 minutes, 34 seconds) than the Acer Aspire E3-111-C1BW (15:04), the HP Pavilion 11t-n000 x360 (15:59), and the Lenovo Yoga 2 11 (16:08), but that’s a contrast between slow and slower. The Dell XPS 11 had the best time by a wide margin on Photoshop (6:50), thanks to its significantly more powerful Intel Core i5 processor.

Battery life is a bit short on the Radius 11: just 5 hours, 17 minutes, on our rundown test. Asus’ T100TA more than doubled that (11:20), but even among more similar systems, like the Lenovo Yoga 2 11 (6:53), HP Pavilion 11t-n000 x360 (5:40), and Dell XPS 11 (5:55), the Radius 11 is at the back of the crowd.