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Toshiba’s introductory Netbook does not break any new ground, merely provides improved battery life and a faster central processing unit than many in the same price range.

While we have never been especially enamored of the Toshiba NB205’s clumsy battery and awful audio, this $399 retail package is still a better deal than alike retail Netbooks we have reviewed at the same price from Asus and HP.

With a familiar set of parts, including an Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1GB of RAM, Windows 7 Starter, and a 160GB 5,400rpm HDD, the NB205 hits all the Netbook marks, yet you are able to find similar parts for as much as $100 less if you shop around.

Having said that, the textured design is a standout, and the large touch pad and mouse buttons are among the best we have used on a Netbook.

When we 1st critiqued the launch edition of the NB205, we were impressed with its fingerprint-resistant textured lid and multiple color options, which were a nice break from the shiny black systems we have seen from Asus, HP, and others. Although not the slightest Netbook we have seen, the chassis has a boxlike, flat design with rounded corners, which makes for a nicely advanced look.

The NB205 goes for a advanced keyboard, with wide separated tile keys. That makes each key a bit smaller, but the distance from letter to letter is actually close to what you’d find in a mainstream laptop keyboard. Some users claim to love this layout, and we eventually got used to it, but we favor the low-profile wide, flat keys found on most other current Netbooks. In the NB205’s case, some important keys get cut down a little too much, including the Tab key, and the tilde key is awkwardly shoved into the left of the spacebar, throwing off our touch typing.

Much better is the new and innovative touch pad. It is a bit more than 3 inches wide, which is the biggest we’ve seen on a 10-inch Netbook. The oversized mouse buttons are also very useful, making for much easier screen navigation–there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to navigate a tiny screen with a tiny touch pad. More Netbook-makers should adopt this as their new standard.

One unsatisfying feature was the system’s audio, or lack thereof. The single speaker, located on the underside of the system, was nearly useless; even with the volume cranked all the way up, we could barely make out the audio from podcasts, music, or Web video without resorting to headphones.

The 10.1-inch wide-screen display offers a 1,024×600 native resolution, which is standard for Netbooks, although higher-resolution options are readily available in Netbooks that start at the same $399 you’ll pay for the NB205.

Toshiba equips nearly all its laptops with sleep-and-charge technology, including one of the three USB ports on the NB205. That lets you to power or charge USB devices from that port, even if the laptop is sleeping, hibernating, or off. Bluetooth is not included, nor is the newer 802.11n flavor of Wi-Fi–we’d anticipate to see at least one of those in a $399 Netbook.

Netbooks tend to live within a rather narrow performance margin, and the somewhat faster N280 version of Intel’s Atom processor found in the NB205 did not have much of an impact compared with the N270 Netbooks in our Holiday 2009 Retail Laptop Roundup. That said, almost any Intel Atom N-series system provides enough computing power for the basic tasks for which they are designed–namely Web surfing, processing office documents, and some basic multimedia playback–as long as expectations are kept modest.

But keep in mind that the next generation of Atom chips is around the corner, and even some current or very imminent models include the dual-core Atom and Nvidia’s Ion graphics chip, therefore the standards of acceptable Netbook performance may be about to change.

Check more about this product here: Toshiba Mini NB205-N325BL