Toshiba's Satellite Pro M70 is part of the company's Business Value range of notebooks and, to quote Toshiba; "Combining great design and cutting edge performance the Satellite Pro M70 series is ideal for power hungry computing."

Well, you wouldn't argue with the first point, as it is a very well made notebook, but far from having cutting edge performance it's more a case of average performance. And the power hungry part is certainly true, but not in a good way; the battery life of the Satellite Pro M70 is pretty poor for its class.

Battery life isn't the only restraint on using the Satellite Pro M70 as a laptop for the mobile business user. Weighing in at a hefty 2.9kg it's not a notebook you'd want to be carrying around all day.

Its not all doom and gloom, however. The Satellite Pro M70 does have some nice features, starting with its design. Stylishly finished in black and silver, it certainly looks the part, with the two touchpad buttons forming part of a black, rubberised detailing strip. The keyboard is well positioned while the keys themselves feel well made and responsive.

To the right of the keyboard sits a group of six buttons comprising one programmable button, a multimedia button which allows music or DVDs to be played without booting the notebook, and four audio/video control buttons. The screen's not bad either; a 15.4-inch WXGA 'Trubrite' widescreen display, and with a native resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels, it's just the job for watching DVD movies on.

But you will have to choose shorter films rather than longer if you plan to watch them on the move, as the Satellite Pro M70 generated a MobileMark DVD playback time of just 110 minutes, which is a surprise considering the 4,000mAh capacity of the battery.

Powering the Satellite Pro M70 is a Intel Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz) processor backed by 512MB of PC-4200 DDR2 memory which pushes the laptop to a Sysmark 2004SE score of 140: perfectly adequate for most office applications but far from cutting edge.

The same applies to the Satellite Pro M70's graphics sub-system, which uses ATI's Mobility Radeon X600SE and gave an unplayable FarCry score of 16fps. For storage Toshiba has given the M70 a 60GB hard drive and to backup your data there is a reasonably fast dual format, dual layer DVD drive.

Toshiba's new laptop certainly looks the part and you do get a well made notebook for your money, but its performance, especially its battery life, fails to do it justice. There's an awful lot of notebooks about in this price bracket which may not have the same build quality but leave the Satellite Pro M70 standing in the performance stakes.

A smart looking, well built notebook, but the Satellite Pro M70 seems to be caught between two stools; it's a bit too heavy, its poor battery life compromises its mobility and it's not powerful enough to be called a true desktop replacement.