Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott steinem you want to see a twist in ultrabooks how about a super ultra widescreen laptop the toshiba satellite you 845 w is a new type of ultrabook that is a strange mutation on what we've seen before this screen has a 17 92 x 768 screen resolution which is odd and has a 21-9 aspect ratio so your average 13-inch laptop or Windows laptop would have a 16-9 screen this is even wider and for cinema scope style movies or movies that get letterboxd you think well this would be perfect and that's what it's meant for to show movies without any letterboxing combined with some really over-the-top good Harman Kardon speakers that are included sounds great in theory and practice it's a little bit of a hit and miss experience and I'll tell you why because hey there's no DVD drive on this laptop there's no blu-ray drive on this laptop that's because it's an ultrabook but we've seen ultrabooks now with optical drives in the last couple of months so it's not really much of an excuse and for this type of laptop you'd want to pop in your cool old movies that you'd like to see in widescreen and you can't do that here unless you plug into DVD drive via USB and are you really going to do that I wouldn't so what you're stuck with here is downloads and streaming video now if you're downloading a video file or able to you know rip your own video files that you want to put into that format that you've recorded well then sure you can show them off in this format streaming depends on the service provider and how they stream their videos I tested out on Netflix Hulu Plus and YouTube for instance and the results were mixed sometimes you'd see that the video clip would show off perfectly within its borders other ones showed off pillar ring or pillar boxing which is that black bars on the sides not a surprise if it's not a full widescreen video and other show window boxing where the entire video gets surrounded by an extra container of black bars like a mat within a mat and that's pretty frustrating but there's nothing you can really do a couple of netflix movie showed that through trailers on hulu plus and there really isn't an easy tool on this toshiba laptop to blow up that video to fit the screen so you're left a little bit between here and there but this wide screen is also pretty good for putting two windows that you're browsing on side by side now it's not quite the extra screen resolution of a 1920 x 1080 but it's close and i found that it was great for putting those two windows or two word documents on one screen there's another advantage here and that the footprint to this laptop is really shallow so you can fit into an airline tray or a place that doesn't have a lot of depth there it is long this laptop feels a bit like a surfboard and it may be a tight fit in some bags it's kind of the footprint of a 15 inch or but a bit of a sawed-off barrel here because its top height here is actually lower than a 13-inch laptop and let's get into some other details with that screen it's a 14 point 4 inch screen but what does that mean really well if you use it you might find that the text is actually coming off a little bit small and that's because the height on that screen is five and three-quarters inches which is actually a smaller screen height then you get on a 14-inch laptop or even a 13-inch or even a 12.5 inch in fact I held a new third gen ipad up to it and it was about similar screen height so imagine that ipad screen stretched out super wide and you've kind of got what you've got here it's a it's an odd type of a screen it's an odd type of terminology and that's not the same as calling a regular 13-inch laptop of 13 inch or even a 14-inch laptop this is its own beast and so buyer beware in terms of that now you may get some use out of that screen you're going to get a lot more use out of those speakers which sound fantastic and are the best that I've heard on an ultrabook and the rest of the specs in here are pretty straightforward a 500 gigabyte hard drive six gigs of ram a core i5 3rd gen processor that's ultrabook and we've seen that on a lot of laptops the problem is you can get those specs in other ultrabooks for about eight hundred dollars and this is 999 so you are paying up for the feature set here with that wide screen and with those speakers if this excites you will then hey so she was made you a concept laptop and you don't have to pay a lot of money to get into it and the battery life is good but on the flip side are you really going to use this ultra wide screen and what are you going to use it for yeah that's the concern and certainly that's a valid concern and how many software programs are really going to take advantage of that screen resolution you're basically going to have to fit those windows yourself I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the funky weird and kind of useful toshiba satellite you 8 45 w