Toshiba Satellite C55Dt-A5307 Full-Size Touch Laptop for $400

Here’s a cheap way to experience Windows 8 with touch input on a full-size laptop. The Toshiba Satellite C55Dt-A5307 provides a 15.6-inch touch-screen and AMD’s computing technology for only $400.

Besides the multi-touch display with the common 1366×768 resolution and glossy coating, Toshiba’s C55Dt-A5307 provides the AMD quad-core A6-5200 processor with built-in AMD Radeon HD 8400 integrated graphics, 4GB of DDR3 RAM memory, a 500GB hard drive, a DVD writer, and a six-cell battery. Despite being a quad-core chip instead of dual-core, the A6-5200 is a lower-end CPU part, but it’s capable enough for daily web browsing, social networking, office, and multimedia playback tasks. You can read more about it and see comparison against similar CPUs here. Other components are characteristic for the budget-class laptops, with no big surprises or disappointments. The main positive exception is the aforementioned touch capability, but the display resolution is also commonly used on the cheap laptops. We have no info on battery life.

The laptop has a pretty sober and practical design. It’s made of matte black plastic with lined “Trax Horizon” texture. Toshiba has combined the casing with a tile-style keyboard with numeric pad and no backlight. The chassis is lightly curved. The whole system weighs 5.3 pounds and is 1.3″ thick when the lid is closed. It’s a little heavy to take around with you all day, every day, but is a standard weight for a 15.6-inch budget laptop.

Rounding off on-body bits, let’s mention the C55Dt-A5307 has one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, a 6-in-1 media card reader, HDMI and VGA video connectors, and mic-in & headphone-out audio ports. For Internet connectivity, the laptop uses wired and wireless LAN. The selection of connectivity and expandability features is purely budget-minded, with no extras found on higher-class laptops, such as Bluetooth or Wireless Display technology.

To conclude, other than the touch-screen, you can’t find any stand-out feature on this model like full HD display, keyboard backlight, aluminum chassis, or high-end processor. But if you try to find a touch-enabled 15.6-inch laptop for the price of $400 in the market, there’s only a minor chance that you’ll find one at the time of this writing. However, adding only $30 more to your amount of money for a new laptop will open possibility for a more stylish touch notebook – the Intel-powered Asus S500CA-SI30401U, with similar computing performance and aluminum casing. As a downside, the Asus doesn’t have a built-in optical drive. Another alternative for budget-conscious shoppers is the Lenovo P400 Touch – 59371991 with a smaller 14″ but higher-res 1600×900 display, aluminum chassis, and a way faster Intel i5 processor.