Toshiba Tecra M4-S515

Our full-featured test unit came with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a PC Card slot, and other standard ports. Whether you're in laptop or tablet mode (the default tablet screen orientation is portrait), you can reach all of them easily. The same goes for the status lights, which are conveniently located on the front of the case in laptop mode and down the left side of the case in tablet mode. The one exception may be the stylus silo and optical drive--a DVD burner in my unit--which reside at the bottom of the case in tablet mode. If this bothers you, you can rotate the screen 90 degrees to landscape orientation, thus changing the relative position of the ports.

The M4-S515's shortcut buttons make tablet use convenient. They include not only the usual Task Manager and display rotation buttons but also a lockable launch button for Microsoft Outlook. A versatile joystick-like button scrolls in four directions and drills down to menus for setting brightness, power, and other features. You can reprogram this button and the display rotation button to launch applications or Web sites. Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 converts handwriting to text more easily than ever. I used the floating Input Panel's text-writing pad most often, correcting rare errors in the easy-to-use character pad. The writing pad translated my chicken scratch accurately almost every time.

Performance was fine. Our test unit, equipped with a 2-GHz Pentium M 760 processor and 512MB of RAM, earned a WorldBench 5 score of 78--slightly lower than the 85 and 83 earned by two Windows XP Professional laptops with the same processor and amount of RAM. On one charge, the M4-S515's battery lasted 2 hours, 41 minutes, which is slightly below the average for currently tested notebooks.

The M4-S515's 80GB hard drive and two memory slots are user accessible, and the unit comes with Microsoft Works and OneNote. You get a basic printed softbound manual plus a more detailed, hyperlinked Acrobat manual on the hard drive. Oddly, neither offers drawings or photos of the notebooks features; for those, you'll have to go to Toshiba's Web site, and we recommend making that trip if you've never used a tablet PC before. (Note: The M4-S515 is a built-to-order model number currently unavailable on Toshiba's Web site. You can order the M4-S115TD in the configuration that we tested.)

Upshot: This convertible notebook has a well-designed case, but our test unit's touchpad didn't function properly.

Carla Thornton