The Toshiba Tecra R850-10R is neither the fastest, cheapest nor most full-featured of business laptops. But it’s a good all-rounder for anyone that may be desk-bound most of the time but requires a system that can occasionally travel too.
It also offers decent performance, an Intel Core i5-2520M dual-core chip helping to power the Toshiba Tecra R850-10R to a solid WorldBench 6 score of 128 points.
There's little to set it apart from the opposition in the spec – 4GB of RAM is standard while the 320GB hard drive is relatively small these days. It is a faster 7200rpm type, though, and so should offer slightly improved performance over standard 5400rpm units.
There's a DVD±DL optical drive and a decent selection of ports, including one USB 3.0, an eSATA/USB 2.0 combo, two USB 2.0 ports and a DisplayPort. VGA for hooking up to older monitors.
Battery life is particularly impressive, with the Tecra managing just over seven hours in our tests. And usablility is rather good – the keyboard keys are well-spaced, with a numeric keypad to the right. All the important keys – Return, Backspace, Spacebar and right-Shift button are all of a good size, as are the Cursor keys.
The touchpad of the Toshiba Tecra R850-10R is easy to use and should you favour a trackpoint there's one here too; you can also turn the touchpad off easily with a button just below the Spacebar.
The Toshiba Tecra R850-10R's screen is a cracker. Although colour depth and sharpness are slightly compromised by the anti-glare coating, it is still eminently usable and won't reflect ambient light into your eyes.
The overall design is plain and unfussy, which is perfect for a work-focused laptop. Build quality is satisfactory, if plasticky.
One downside is its lack of a dedicated graphics chip, meaning that it won't be so useful for work involving professional graphics manipulation – design or 3D modelling programs, for example.
