Toshiba Radius P55W-B5220 15.6″ Convertible Laptop

There’s a new wave of full-size 15.6-inch touchscreen laptops on the market. These with a fully rotatable hinge, allowing use of the notebook as a tablet or presentation screen. That’s a system first implemented on the Lenovo Yoga series. The 15.6-inch Toshiba Radius P55W-B5220 is one of them.

Besides the convertible design and 1080p display with IPS wide viewing angle technology, highlights of the P55W-B5220 are the 4th Gen Intel Core i5-4210U dual-core processor with Intel HD 4400 integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM memory, and a 750GB hard drive. The components are packed in a 0.8″ thin chassis. The laptop weighs 4.9 pounds which is quite light for a 15.6-incher, but keep in mind that you’ll have hard time holding it as an ordinary tablet. The chassis is covered with brushed aluminum in silver color, giving the laptop a hint of luxury. The keyboard consists of chicle-style backlight keys and it has a dedicated numeric pad. The trackpad has integrated click buttons.

Back to the core components, the processor inside Toshiba’s P55W-B5220 is a mid-range solution. It’s perfect for all daily productivity tasks the average Windows PC user might throw at it. However, for video production and professional-class photo editing, the i7 chips are a better solution especially the quad-core models. The HD graphics built into the processor enables play of the latest demanding games, but only on lower settings and resolutions.

Alongside ubiquitous stereo speakers, web camera, Wi-Fi wireless, and HDMI video port, the notebook features three USB jacks, media card reader, Bluetooth, Intel Wireless Display technology as an additional perk. As you’ve maybe noticed, Ethernet LAN network jack and VGA video output are missing.

According to Toshiba, the battery life on the Radius P55W-B5220 is up to 8 hours and 25 minutes. That’s an exceptionally long run time away from the power socket, but the result is probably with the lightest possible system load involved and all power settings turned on. Anyway, if you get more than six-hour battery life on a 15.6-inch laptop with an Intel Core CPU, it’s a quite admirable autonomy.

Regarding other similar laptops, direct competitors to this model are the Asus Q502LA-BBI5T12 and HP 15-U011DX. The Toshiba has the lowest price among them. True, the Asus and HP have larger 1-Terabyte hard drives and the HP has a faster processor, but it lacks IPS technology and keyboard backlight. All factors combined, the P55W-B5220 appears to be the best choice among them.