Digital Trends

Toshiba Dynabook SX April 27th, 2004 | by Nabeel Hyatt

Battery Issues

Another common compromise on ultralights is the battery. This is mostly because while many other components, such as the microprocessor, have increased by leaps and bounds, current battery technology is over ten years old.

Lithium Ion is the most commonly found battery in notebooks such as the Dynabook SX. L-ion is such a terror for ultra-portables in particular because it must be formed into a square, taking up valuable space which is at a premium in a notebook the size of a hardcover book. It also happens to be the single heaviest component.

Lithium Polymer batteries, introduced in the late 1990s, were supposed to reverse this trend, allowing you to create a soft and flexible battery that could be curled around the underside of a keyboard and hug corners. However, Polymer batteries turned out to be quite expensive, and although they've been included in some ultralights, such as Fujitsu's Loox from Dynamism,  they are typically packed just like the old Lithium Ion.

The Dynabook SX battery (left) will only give you about two hours of mobile computing.

Toshiba has gone with the older Lithium Ion battery, packing it on the back of the laptop, apparently satisfied with the meager two hours of life. Whether consumers will be willing to take such a short battery life just to shave a few ounces remains to be seen, but the Dynabook is clearly not the blockbuster the Libretto was. We found it disconcerting that the component that was responsible for a major part of the weight and size of the unit performed so dismally.

This seems surprising for a company with such a vaunted history in ultralights. The Toshiba Dynabook is part of a long line of ultralights from Toshiba, one of the first companies to release an ultralight notebook with the Libretto. It was also one of the first to use a Lithium Polymer battery, the first to build a trackpad into a laptop, and the first to have more than three hours of battery life.

Conclusion

In the end, Toshiba's approach to the battery is indicative of the overall product, an utterly conventional approach to a category of notebooks that is entrusted with defying convention.

The Dynabook SX is a textbook case of beauty being more than skin deep. It is an ultralight that is excellent at first glance but suffers upon detailed inspection. Once you get over the flashy exterior and diminutive size, the poor battery performance, annoyingly hard to push trackpad buttons, and a generally hollow-feeling shell might make you wish they kept this product in Japan.
 
While Dynamism has come through again in preparing a hot Japanese notebook for U.S. consumers, Toshiba made an average notebook barely worth the effort.