Toshiba Satellite U205, Portege R400, Satellite P105, Satellite A135

One nice touch that we don't see on too many notebooks is a simple thumbwheel like volume control. You usually have to press some combination of keystrokes or open up some software functionality in the operating system to raise or lower the volume. If you've ever been in one of those circumstances where you're in the middle of a meeting and just the act of visiting some Web page causes the audio to start blaring, you'll immediately understand the value of Toshiba's design choice.

There is one design detail that Toshiba overlooked though (unless the actual systems are different from what's pictured). On other notebooks (Lenovo's Thinkpads for example), the headphone and microphone jacks are colored green and red respectively to make identification of which is which from a distance much easier (often, the jacks that go into them are similarly colored).

For David Berlind's write-up on the Portégé, see his post in ZDNet's TestBed blog.