Toshiba Satellite P50W Review

Toshiba’s latest Satellite laptop, the Toshiba Satellite P50W features a fully flippable screen, because that’s the style of the time. It’s not the reason to buy this particular laptop, however.
If there’s a fashion for laptops in 2014, it’s for being convertible, whether that’s a conversion that takes place by removing the screen display, as is the case with the Acer Aspire Switch 10 Pro, or by having a nearly 360 degree hinge, as with the Lenovo Yoga Pro 3. That’s the path that Toshiba’s gone down with the Toshiba Satellite P50W, a 15.6 inch Windows 8.1 laptop with a hinge that allows for its display screen to flip entirely backwards, making it into a rather immense Windows 8.1 laptop.
Toshiba of course sells a lot of notebooks under its Satellite branding and even under the Satellite P50 series moniker as well. The P50W’s particular trick within its premium space is that flippable screen. Underneath the keyboard lurks a 2.7GHz Intel Core i5 processor 4210U, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB SATA hard drive. The display screen is a 15.6 inch 1920×1080 16:9 Touchscreen LCD, but then as a notebook designed to be used as a tablet it has to be.

The Toshiba Satellite P50W features a full keyboard including number pad with reasonable type response and very few of the issues that throwing a full number pad onto the keyboard usually entails. Toshiba’s opted to throw the touchpad in the middle of the primary keyboard section, however, which takes a little getting used to if you expect it to be in the true centre of the laptop body itself.
The Toshiba Satellite P50W rather prominently features Harmon Kardon speakers that run across the top body of the laptop itself. They’re quite serviceable for entertainment purposes, although the inclusion of the number pad rather points this particular laptop more towards the business end of the spectrum. The Toshiba Satellite P50W features 3 USB 3.0 ports, 1 HDMI port, SD card reader and a combined microphone/headphone port. On a laptop of this size a combo mic/headphone port is always slightly irksome, because there’s clearly design space to accommodate both for those who will need it.
The Toshiba Satellite P50W’s party piece is the ability, like other premium laptops to flip its screen fully around and become a tablet. The hinge for this is quite basic, but functional, but one thing quickly becomes apparent when you do so.
This is one big and very heavy tablet indeed.
It weighs in at 2.2kg, or to put it in straight tablet terms, just a little over five iPad Air 2 tablets. Even within the Windows tablet space it’s 2.75 Surface Pro 3s to lug around, and that’s quite significant for a device you’re going to hold in your hands for any length of time.

At this size it’s a desktop replacement unit in all but name, and those kinds of laptops just don’t make for great tablet experiences. It’s the first time I’ve appreciated why you might want to use a device like this in “tent” mode, because at least that way you’re propping it up on something. There’s nothing dysfunctional about its touch tablet performance in terms of finger recognition, but this isn’t a tablet that’s comfortable to hold for anything but a couple of minutes.
Large scale laptops are rarely killers when it comes to battery life, but then it’s fair to assume that they’ll spend a decent amount of their working lives tethered to a power cord. The Toshiba Satellite P50W managed a very respectable five hours and fifty seven minutes on a looped video test with full brightness and Wi-Fi active, which means that you should be able to get a reasonable day’s work out of it even if you are away from your power source for a while.

The Core i5 processor that lies at the heart of the Toshiba Satellite P50W is a serviceable critter without being truly high powered, and that’s bolstered by the lack of a dedicated GPU, instead relying on Intel’s HD Graphics 4400 solution. As such benchmark scores were solid but unspectacular, with a PCMark 8 Home score of 1927, Work score of 2327 and Creative score of 1887, while in 3DMark it scored 23504 in Ice Storm, 3997 In Cloud Gate and 533 in Fire Strike. This isn’t a gaming laptop to speak of, although it should hold its own if your ambitions are modest.
The Toshiba Satellite P50W mimics the style of its time with its flippable screen, but that’s not really a standout feature in a laptop this large. If you’re after premium and light, you’d be better served looking elsewhere, such as the Surface Pro 3 or Yoga Pro 3. On the other hand, the Toshiba Satellite P50W comes in at a decent price discount to those options.
Toshiba’s RRP for the Toshiba Satellite P50W in Australia is $1,599, but as an example at the time of writing Dick Smith Electronics is selling it at $1,199. No, I’m totally not responsible for that price if it happens to be higher when you click that link. That being said, at that kind of price as a notebook with limited tablet ability due to its weight, it’s a solid option.