Toshiba announces 4K Skylake hybrid laptop

published 3 September 2015

Toshiba was one of the first laptop manufacturers to come out with a 4K laptop last year, but that was a chunky desktop replacement. It hasn't been possible until now for Toshiba to create a 4K ultraportable as the Japanese giant had to wait for Intel's sixth generation Core processors, code-named Skylake, which have integrated graphics powerful enough to drive a 4K screen without consuming huge amounts of power.

The Toshiba Satellite Radius 12 isn't just a Windows 10 4K laptop, it's a hybrid too so it can transform into a tablet. Simply flip the screen all the way back so that it lies flat against the underside of the keyboard base. While 1.3kg is light for a laptop, it's heavy for a tablet so you're more likely to use it in a half-way orientation for watching videos and flipping through photos or perhaps only occasionally as a full-on tablet.

The 12.5in screen has a 3840x2160 pixel Ultra HD screen (a 1080p variant will apparently also be available). In our brief hands-on it looked very bright and sharp. The Radius 12 runs Windows 10 so text and image scaling should be far better than it was on similarly high resolution laptops with Windows 8.1, but you'll still need software updated for such high resolutions to avoid unreadably small or coarse looking text.

The Radius 12 looks like a smaller version of the existing Radius 15. It's thin with a metal-effect chassis. Notably, it has a USB 3.1 Type-C port although this isn't used for charging (a standard chunky power port is used for that). It is instead used only for connecting USB Type-C peripherals which are currently thin on the ground. There's also a pair of USB 3.0 ports, HDMI and a SD card reader.

Based on a brief hands-on, we have our concerns about the touchpad but the keyboard feels large, comfortable and responsive. This isn't always the case with Toshiba laptops, but it appears the company has stuck with one of its better keyboards for this laptop - and so it should for a computer at this price.

The Toshiba Satellite Radius 12 looks like a promising 4K ultra portable laptop, costing around 999 for a model with a Core i7-6500U processor, 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. Whether Intel's new sixth generation integrated graphics really can give you 4K and long battery life, the best of both worlds, remains to be seen. The Radius 12 should arrive in the UK later this year and we'll bring you a full review as soon as we can.

Toshiba also announced a successor to the Satellite Click Mini the Satellite Click Mini 10. This new budget hybrid is very similar to its predecessor except it now has one of Intel's latest Atom processors the x5-Z8300 along with 2GB of memory and a 32GB SSD.

While we hope the Click Mini 10's Atom x5-Z8300 will improve upon the dire performance and responsiveness of its predecessor used in the original Click Mini, the limited 2GB of memory is a serious concern (this is apparently a bizarre limitation imposed by Microsoft, tying certain Atom configurations to particular Windows OEM licence prices).