I packed the Toshiba Tecra up this afternoon and gave it to a DHL man to be taken back to the TalkToshiba people.

The experience has been a little disappointing. The Tecra A8 is a good enough piece of kit, but it wouldn’t be my choice if I were looking to spend some money on a laptop. It falls between the two types of machine I’d be interested in.

The Tecra was a little too large for me to consider putting it in my man-bag and toting it around town. True, the size allowed for a full size keyboard and the large screen, but these reduced its portability. I’d like to have something lighter and smaller that I can take anywhere with me. Like the old Portege I’m typing this post up on. An even simpler solution I’m thinking of is getting a bluetooth folding keyboard for my mobile.

At the other end of the price spectrum I could really go for the current version of the portege or some other tablet PC with a flip round screen that I could do art on. Or maybe an Apple Macbook, for all my video editing dreams.

It’s been interesting, but I’m afraid the Tecra A8 isn’t for me.

I turned the Tecra on without plugging it in, to test battery life, and got nearly two hours out of it. Which isn’t bad. I wasn’t doing anything too testing, definitely no cds or dvds and very little heavy processing. At some point the screen goes to half brightness to conserve power, which is a little irritating but I could live with it.

For various reasons I haven’t been able to play with the laptop as much as I’d like for the last few days. It is finally talking to the house network wirelessly, but only because I installed a NetGear USB wireless adaptor. Weak internal wireless is a problem at least one person has told me about on their personal Toshiba laptop.

The laptop doesn’t have a firewire socket, so I can’t get video off my old mini-dv camcorder. However, I now have a JVC hard drive camcorder which transfers by USB, so I’ll shoot some footage and try transferring it onto the laptop.

I have, however, been able to watch some stuff on the laptop. Video playback from dvd is crisp and stutter free. Sound from the built in speakers is good enough for something your watching whilst it’s sat on your lap.

The next challenge would be to see how well it copes as a games machine, but we don’t have anything in the house for pcs that would really test it.

So, overall, a mostly disappointing few days of Toshiba testing. I’ll try to get more done tomorrow.