It is the best compromise that I could find between price and features. Bluetooth drivers are in it but you have to add the chip ($5 dongle and taking up a USB port). The worst compromise is it comes with almost no software, but that seems to be standard practice in the industry now.

My complaints are the touch pad interface is intermittent making it sometimes too sensitive and other times I cannot drag the cursor anywhere, and the cursor ‘disappears’ when the memory is busy. The integrated graphics and dynamic RAM allocation can be smarter; I still have to manually clear cache to retain performance when using graphics-intensive applications.

Read the one-star review and the responses to it about the cursor jumping to different parts of the screen during typing. Those people say it’s the touch pad picking up static from the thumb. If that’s indeed the reason for that annoying error, then it’s a design flaw. Other vendors’ touch pads don’t do this.

#1 (terrible first impression): It took all afternoon and into the evening to get the unit talking to my LinkSys WRT54G wireless router. The wireless communication was connected, the router had assigned an IP address, but the NB205 refused to get it. It sat at “acquiring IP address” until it timed out. I have a static IP block reserved on my router, so I gave the NB205 a static IP address and filled in the gateway and DNS server IPs, and it *still* wouldn’t talk. In technical parlance, it wasn’t just a problem with ARP – the entire transport layer simply wasn’t working.

A wired connection to the router worked fine. But that wasn’t a workaround that I was prepared to accept.

I researched on the Web and found that various Toshiba models seem to have a lot of trouble with wireless, and that there are probably a hundred different things that people said finally got theirs working.

What finally worked for me was to turn off WEP security on both the router and the NB205. That immediately got them talking, at the expense of breaking all of my other wireless links (two computers and a Wii). Then I turned WEP back on, and they stayed talking. No problems since.

#2 (good): The battery life is pretty danged long. Maybe not the claimed nine hours, but seven or eight (with WiFi turned off and using power-saver profile). I suspect that a good part of that comes from using an e-IPS display.

#3 (bad but expected): The manual is provided on the hard drive, not in print. The manual is disorganized and mostly useless. This seems to be par for the course for modern computers.

#4 (very slightly bad): The manual says that if you shut the unit down by closing the lid (sleep mode, hibernate, or whatever) that when you open the lid it’ll start back up. It doesn’t. You have to press the power button.

#5 EDITED: (very annoying until I figured out what was wrong): I had given up on using Sleep/Standby mode because about half of the time when I turned it back on the unit completely rebooted. Hibernate mode always seemed to work. The problem turned out to be that one of the latches for the battery pack wasn’t locked, and the netbook would lose power if the unit was lifted in a way that tried to separate the pack from the main unit. So it was my own error, but I learned to pay attention to those latches.

#6 (generally good): I got this netbook specifically for writing. The keyboard seemed to be the best available in the netbook form factor, and I’m finding the keyboard to be quite usable for extended typing sessions. A couple of keys got relocated into funky positions, though. (Maybe other netbook keyboards do the same, I don’t know.)

#7 (good): The touchpad is the first one that I’ve found to be actually usable.

#8 (mildly concerning): I had to turn off the vibration alerts because every time I click the touchpad, it sets off the vibration detector.

So… good keyboard, good touchpad, good display, good battery life. That’s what I needed, and it’s working out well. But I have collected some scars from the rough edges of getting it set up and the power on/off arrangements.

FIVE DAYS LATER (an update): I’m really enjoying this little guy. I finally got everything configured the way that I want, and I love working with it. My only day-to-day complaint is a silly one: I sometimes write while lying down, with my legs bent and the netbook propped against my legs, and in that position the clicker buttons on the touchpad rest against my belly and tend to click when I don’t want them to. I’ve learned to use Fn-F9 to disable the touchpad while I’m doing that.

Good points:
1) build quality seems high compared to other netbooks that I looked at.
2) keyboard and touchpad are very usable.
3) the NB205 looks great (my opinion).
4) screen is bright and usable outdoors. There is a glossy finish but compared to glossy notebooks that I have, the NB205 seems better.
5) Battery life seems to be good. Using full power and bright screen, the batter lasts over 6 hours. With battery saving features enabled, would last longer.

Bad points:
1) Speaker is terrible. I use earbuds which work fine.
2) Many special Toshiba programs used to control hardware and do different system tasks. This only a bad point if you are thinking of upgrading to Windows 7 because it may make the upgrade harder (are there Windows 7 versions available of these programs, etc.).

I upgraded the memory to 2GB. This did not seem to make a significant difference in performance. Perhaps someone who runs more demanding programs might have a different result.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the unit but one must keep in mind there are limitations when using netbooks.

Now on to what I don’t like.
1. The back of the battery does stick out another inch but it does seem to act like a bumper. I bought a Targus bag with a handle and it fits perfectly.
2. The speaker is very inadequate, the earphone jack works well.
3. The Wireless setup was a pain. I wish it had a dedicated switch.
4. The instruction manual is almost useless.
5. Can’t really adjust the screen resolution (although the stock settings are fine).

All in all it was a pleasant surprise and I am glad I waited to buy.