What do you do about a problem like the netbook? Sure, they've taken the world by storm, but as we've mentioned before, it seems that a great many people are buying them without realising that they aren't small laptops that are ready for anything.

As such, manufacturers are pushing a new category - the CULV laptop. Admittedly, that's not much of a name for a category, but as the netbook confusion has proved, saddling devices with labels can just be confusing. The selling point of the CULV laptop is that they're slightly bigger than netbooks, and as such can accommodate larger screens and more usable keyboards, while offering better battery life and more performance. At the same time, it's all done without the high expense of miniaturisation you'll get from the likes of the Toshiba Portege R600. While that starts at £1,149, the T130 starts at £399.

The Toshiba T-130 that we have in front of us is an example of this increasingly popular form factor, yet costs just £469 including VAT from Toshiba's website.
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It's available in both consumer and business flavours, with the choice of processor the differentiating factor. The Pros get Celeron or Core 2 Solo Intel processors, while the consumer models have Core 2 Solo or Pentium processors, and the 1.3GHz SU2700 inside our review sample comes under this latter brand. While this is a brand that's been around for around 15 years, the processor inside is actually based on Intel's Penyrn core from 2007, so you're not being saddled with mid-nineties technology.

The key facet of the Core 2 Solo, is the single core-processor (the clue's in the name), which does seem a little old school. This means that if you are the multi tasking type this probably isn't the machine for you. As it turned out, our machine managed to turn in a score of 0.52 in our benchmarks. This is actually only slightly faster than you'll see from a netbook, so it's a little disappointing in that respect.

As for battery life, Toshiba claims a quite stupendous 11 hours, but in our light use test we achieved eight hours 38 minutes. This is still an impressive amount of time though and if you need to work away from the mains for extended periods you could rely on this machine. The battery is removable so a spare could be picked up for serious long haul use.

LED backlights used to be the preserve of more expensive machines but i'ts now a common site on laptops of all prices. Sure enough there's one here and it's bright enough that we had to reduce the setting to make it comfortable to use under office lights. We found colours to be rich but even too, though we found the reds to be slightly pale.

A webcam is located in the bezel, and is capable of up to 640 x 480 resolution, but we found that the image was grainier than we would have liked. The webcam can actually be used to log into the system using a face recognition software tool and we can confirm that it works. However, it also takes a good few minutes to set up and quite a few seco...

Author: Benny Har-Even

Read more from IT PRO: Toshiba Satellite T-130 13K review: CULV laptop