Toshiba Libretto W105-L251

Toshiba Libretto W105-L251

There's been plenty of buzz for the high-concept Toshiba Libretto W100 series since it was first announced in June 2010. This dual-touch-screen minilaptop is a limited-release showpiece designed by Toshiba to celebrate the company's 25th anniversary in the mobile computing business, and is best seen as an experiment that pushes the boundaries between laptops, tablets, and portable media players. Despite the far-out thinking behind it, the Libretto worked in practice better than we expected in some areas, including certain kinds of media playback and general Web surfing. That was especially surprising, as the system is running Windows 7 Home Premium over two simultaneous displays, all from a 1.2GHz Intel Pentium U5400 CPU and 2GB of RAM. Our configuration (the only one currently available, according to Toshiba's Web site) is called the W105-L251 and sells for $1,099. Though it certainly can't compete against full-size laptops in raw performance, the system's capability to run basic Windows tasks was impressive (given our low initial expectations).