Barry Doyle has an excellent review of the Toshiba M400 on TabletPCReviewSpot.com:
“The Toshiba Portege M400 is one of the most advanced Tablet PCs on the market today. We love the Core Duo processor option and the biometric security. The weight and build quality makes for a great portable travel companion. We would have liked to see Toshiba offer dedicated graphics as an option for those users who actually want to play games beyond Solitaire, but Toshiba left us hi and dry in that regard. Overall, we would recommend the M400 as yet another fantastic contender in the “thin and light” convertible Tablet PC category.”
I’ve been using a Toshiba M400 for the last several days. My thoughts? It’s a great upgrade to the M200. I elected for the display upgrade so the model I have has 1400×1050 resolution. As a developer, I love this feature. In terms of perfomance, the dual core is nice; it’s noticable snappy.
And yes, the fan does run a lot. It’s not loud like some have indicated. But it does run. It must be doing its thing because I’ve never noticed the unit getting too hot. I’d much rather have a little fan noise than a hot system.
The main drawback I have with the M400 are all the apps and icons it comes loaded with. It’s a mess. There’s a ton of junk in the System Tray, there are a handful of desktop icons to various products, there’s a non-end-user-editable Start menu link to Toshiba’s buy site, and some other spam content–much like you’d expect to see in a low-end product–which by the way the M400 isn’t. Kind of misplaced if you ask me.
It’s fine if a manufacturer wants to make some money selling desktop real-estate in its boxes, but I really hate it when I’m paying good money for a work system and then I have to go through things and figure out what to delete. It also doesn’t look so hot, when most of the stuff has little to do with the Tablet. Take their desktop link to “free” online software, for instance. There’s not a single Tablet app that I can see.
If you purchase an M400, figure you’re going to spend an hour or two cleaning up the system.
I guess the real measure of a system is whether I’d buy another one. I would. I am keeping my eyes on what Lenovo is doing, however. I’d really like a lighter Tablet since I’m on the go so much.
I’ve got a M400 (T2300 version).
The video card – Intel 945GM – can’t manage to output a 1680×1050 resolution even with the monitor drivers. So, be careful before buy this laptop if you have wide monitor.
With the Vbios from Toshiba you can’t choose 1680×1050 mode and when you call customer service they don’t really help you for this problem.