Pros:
long battery life
attractive slim metallic design of chasis and keyboard
attractive lid (I tried the brown version) not prone to fingerprints
island keyboard very comfortable for typing
compact size
Cons:
horrible Alps trackpad or driver
speaker so weak it's useless
screen bazel is too wide, looks like glued carton and IS glued carton !!!
battery protrudes horizontally on the back (that's not too bad though)
bottom gets unusually warm for an Intel Atom processor even at idle
10" screen makes text appear too tiny - increasing the DPI to 110% helps
webcamera is low quality - grainy and colors significantly off towards bluish
some will find that the white and blue lids look too plastic and cheap, I really like the brown version the best
When I unpacked it, I almost took the bazel off with the stickers. Why make such a cool overall design and then slap a wide carton bazel on it???? What happened to the 'more energy efficient' Atom ? My guess is that either the fan doesn't cool well since they wanted to keep the noise down or there is some heating going on with the RAM since exactly that side of the netbok gets warm.
The deal braker for me was the Alps trackpad. Turns out bigger is NOT always better LOL and I can't understand how neither Laptop magazine nor any of the reviews here noticed that. If you Google "NB205 trackpad problems" you will find a whole thread on a laptop forum about the trackpad. Even at maximum sensitivity, 0.25" of the edges do not respond at all, it's like the actual pad is smaller than the size etched on the chasis. The scrolling works only if you increase the thickness of the scroll strip. The momentum function, which is my favorite with Synaptics rackpads, doesn't work the same way with Alps and is practically useless so I turned it off. The mouse cursor stutters unexplicably all the time or all of sudden doesn't respond to the trackpad. If you plan on using the netbook a lot, you will need an usb mouse...
I am returning the 10" Toshiba and keeping my 11.6" Gateway netbook which is superior in every aspect except the battery life (5 hours for Gateway, 9 hours for Toshiba). The 11.6" display makes a huge difference how much you can view on the screen at a comfortable font size. Surprisingly the bottom of Toshiba, which is an Intel Atom system, gets equally warm to the Gateway, which is an AMD Athlon system, so there is no winner in that aspect. It's not going to toast your lap but I'd rather have both netbooks run cooler. I recommend the Gateway since it runs at the same price, has bigger screen and handles graphics better than the usual Atom systems like Toshiba. And the smaller Synaptics trackpad of Gateway is light years ahead of Toshiba's Mac-like pad in terms of how comfortable and effective it is. Get more detail about Toshiba Mini NB205-N312/BL 10.1-Inch Royal Blue Netbook - 9 Hour Battery Life.
