In the face of an identical hardware platform, Toshiba's netbook fails to bring a unique point of difference.

Design
In what is potentially an attempt to appeal to the business crowd, Toshiba's NB100 features the least personality we've seen so far from a netbook. While stark and functional, we have no doubt this will be the perfect mix for some. The rest of the consumer market has moved on however, with a number of "premium netbooks" (ah, oxymorons) long outstripping the NB100 in the style stakes.

Apart from the piano black lid and silver lip-trim, the rest of the NB100 is coated in matte black, the most outstanding design feature being the battery sticking out the back of the chassis, promising longer battery times. Sadly, this was not to be the case.

While the tilde key has been moved up to near the ESC key, Toshiba has otherwise made very few sacrifices in keyboard layout, even managing to jam in the oft-overlooked F11 and F12 keys. The functionality comes at a price though, with the keyboard being small and cramped.

While the trackpad is passable, the mouse buttons can only be described as miserable, as they are not only thin but, uncomfortably recessed, making them incredibly difficult to activate.

Even though the heat vent points to the right (a huge no-no, meaning right handed external mouse users usually get a blast of hot air toasting their hand), in use we never noticed much being vented out of this at all. There is an option on the keyboard to turn on a CPU fan, however we could neither hear or feel any increase in air pushed out the vent.

Features
The hardware roll-call for the netbook platform is well known, and Toshiba makes no deviations here: a 1.6GHz Intel Atom and 1GB RAM are the standard, and Toshiba has complemented this with a 120GB 5,400RPM hard drive, three USB ports, an SD card reader, headphone and microphone jacks, a low resolution webcam, and at the rear VGA out and 10/100Mbit ethernet. Communications-wise the NB100 supports both 802.11g and Bluetooth.

A bizarre option is included when pressing Fn+ESC, which for some reason dumps the screen to 800x600, a significant drop from the native 1,024x600. We're at a loss as to why it even exists. The screen is also capable of enabling resolutions of up to 1,920x1,080, but anything above 1,024x600 will result in you requiring to scroll the screen using the mouse. It's a nice work-around though for those applications that haven't been designed to take the netbook's low resolution screen into account, including the bundled Norton Internet Security (NIS), with the first pop up already beyond the limits of usable screen real estate.

As a side note, you can't close this dialog without either enabling NIS by pressing the "Next" button, or by terminating the SYMCUW.exe process through Task Manager — for some reason the close button simply doesn't work in XP Home. This is more bug than sinister lock-in though, as the close button works just fine in Vista.

There is, hilariously, a shortcut to "Recovery Disc Creator" and Toshiba's own "DVD Player" on the desktop, and disc burning software is installed. Toshiba apparently haven't noticed the lack of optical drive in their own product, or are optimistically hoping the user picks up an external drive, which will inevitably include its own software anyway. Apart from hardware specific applications, the only other bundled software is Microsoft's Office 2007 trial.

Performance
A netbook is only ever intended for modest uses, and in the case of low resolution flash videos, general web browsing and office work the NB100 does no better or worse than any other, due to the common hardware platform. With all power saving options turned off, screen brightness and volume set to maximum and an XviD file played back, the battery lasted 2 hours, 43 minutes and 33 seconds — a lacklustre result considering the inconvenient bulge the battery causes out the back.

Had Toshiba been the pioneers of the netbook, this would have no doubt been heralded as an amazing product. Sadly, they're one of the last out of the blocks, and since all hardware in netbooks is by and large the same, the game is being fought on usability and looks — and in this deparment the NB100 is simply non-competitive.