At first glance, slider-style Windows 8 convertibles will remind you of smartphones with slide-out keyboards, a style rarely seen anymore. The design hypothetically combines the best aspects of a slate and a physical keyboard, solving the biggest problem of pure tablets, the awkwardness of onscreen typing.
Toshiba Satellite U925t
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Like other slider convertibles, the Toshiba Satellite U925t is an engineering marvel, with a carefully constructed chassis that pulls open and rotates into place, giving you a final form that's closer to an iPad sitting in a keyboard case than a traditional clamshell laptop. It's an acquired taste, but a fun deviation from the norm.
The $1,149 U925t also scores heavily over the other slider-style laptop we recently reviewed, the Sony Vaio Duo 11. That system was also well-built and inventive, but to save space, Sony ditched the touch pad for a tiny optical trackpoint -- a decision that really hobbled the system's usability in the end. I'm much happier with the touch pad on the U925t, small as it is. Even with a touch screen, it turns out that a touch pad is still a really important part of the laptop experience. That alone makes the U925t much more usable than the Sony Duo, but I also appreciated that the screen can be adjusted to (and stays at) nearly any angle, from just short of 90 degrees to 180 degrees.
Will this replace a full-size laptop for everyday productivity? Probably not; the first generation of Windows 8 hybrids and convertibles feel more like proof-of-concept machines than systems you're likely to end up using full-time. But the Satellite U925t is one of my favorite designs so far (even if it shows that most PC companies have simply given up on coming up with interesting names for products), alongside the Acer Aspire S7 and the Dell XPS 12. One complaint, however -- in laptop mode or in tablet mode, the display is always exposed. You'll need at least a sleeve to transport this safely, and even then, I'd be nervous about it.