Toshiba T235D: AMD's 2010 Ultrathin "Nile" Platform

Toshiba T235D: the Best AMD Laptop We've Tested

After going through all the benchmarks, features, etc. we come to the final tally, and for once we have an AMD laptop that we can recommend without hesitation. You're not going to have a great gaming experience on the T235D, but for everything else it works well and the price is right. It's easy to find laptops that are significantly faster, but such laptops cost more and generally fall short in the mobility areas of battery life and size. If you want a good thin and light laptop, Toshiba's T235D deserves a close look, and it delivers a good multimedia experience as well.

Not everyone will like the styling, true, but I can say that the look has grown on me during the time I've spent with the laptop. I'd still prefer a matte finish on all the silver plastic, but the glossy silver is a nice break from all the glossy black I've grown accustomed to seeing. The T235D is a thin and light laptop in every sense of the term, checking in at under 1" thick and weighing under four pounds. With battery life of 5-6.5 hours, very few users are going to need to carry their power adapter around for a single day's use. Also of interest is the 2-prong plug on the power brick, so you don't need to find an outlet with a grounding pin—fitting for a 45W adapter.

When it comes to competition, there are lots of options in the $600 range, but few deliver the same set of features and performance as the T235D. We did a quick search on Newegg, limiting pricing to $500 to $700, with sizes between 11.6" and 14.1" and a weight of less than 4.9 pounds. Perhaps the most interesting alternative is the Acer Aspire AS1551-5448, which sports similar specs to the T235D but with an 11.6" chassis. We hope to get one of those for review in the near future, although it looks like the keyboard carries over from the other 11.6" Acer laptops we've looked at in the past—in other words, not our favorite keyboard. HP's Pavilion DM3 is another alternative that uses the Nile platform. Naturally, there's plenty of competition from older CULV designs, so if you prefer battery life over multimedia capabilities (an area where the GMA 4500MHD is a definite liability) those laptops are still an option. Finally, if you like the look of the T235D but still want an Intel option, the T235-S1350 uses an Intel Pentium U5400 (a 1.2GHz 32nm Arrandale without Hyper-Threading support) for about the same price.

Widening our search a bit, we can find Acer's TimelineX 1830T with a price tag of $600, using the i3-330UM and equipped with 3GB RAM, or it's closer to $700 with an i5-430UM and 4GB RAM. You can also find the T235D-S1340 with 3GB RAM for $520. Even at $600, the T235D-S1345 is a competitive offering, but if you jump on the Office Depot $500 sale price (good until 8/28/2010, though you can likely find a similar sale down the road), this is an awesome bargain.

If you're willing to give up a bit of CPU performance relative to Intel's Arrandale ULV i3/i5 offerings, and a bit of battery life as well, AMD's Nile platform delivers a superior graphics solution and a good feature set at a great price. After playing with the T235D, there's no way I'd want to go back to the current Atom N450 netbooks; I'll give up four hours of battery life for a much better performance and multimedia experience in a hearbeat. We'll have to see what N550 brings to the table, but unless and until Intel gets a better IGP in Atom it's going to need some help. In the meantime, while we wait to see what AMD's Bobcat and Intel's Sandy Bridge bring to the party (more on that soon!), the Nile platform is a nice blend of performance and features and should please many ultraportable enthusiasts.