Toshiba lifts lightest laptop laurels
Macbook Air blown away
BEING CALLED A LIGHTWEIGHT is not often something to be proud of, but Toshiba’s new Portégé R500-S5007V laptop makes Apple’s 1.36 kg MacBook air look like it could use a diet.
Weighing in at only 1.08 kilos, Toshiba’s new machine takes the lightweight title from previous lightweight champion Lenovo and its Thinkpad X300 (1.33 kilos).
The waif of a laptop is only 0.77 inches thick at its thinnest point (which doesn't mean very much as it could, technically, be three and a half feet thick at it's fattest point), and the company claims that it is also the first of its kind to boast a 128 Gig solid-state drive (SSD) to replace the hard drive.
Because SSDs don’t contain any moving parts they use less power than hard drives, which, as well as being more environmentally friendly, also means users should be able to squeeze a purported eight hours of laptop life out of their little lithium-ion batteries.
Another planet-saving feature the company waxes lyrical about in its press release is the laptop's transreflective 12.1-inch screen. By reflecting the sun's rays the screen can self illuminate apparently, meaning the LED (light-emitting diode) backlight can switch itself off and have a rest. Unless you live in rainy Britain of course.
The light-as-air lappy packs an Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 processor at 1.33GHz, with 2M bytes of cache and 2G bytes of RAM. It apparently also comes with Vista Business, but thankfully that’s downgradable to XP. Added trimmings include a SuperMulti optical drive, wired and wireless 802.11 a/g/n networking and Bluetooth 2.0 support.
Toshiba also reckons that its lightweight offering contains a specially-built little motherboard which apparently has the same functionality as boards found in 15.4 inch laptops, but is a third of the size.
But as celebrity slimmers and nouvelle cuisine have already taught us, less costs more, and at $2,999 the Portégé doesn’t come cheap.
The firm says the lightweight lappy will start shipping in the third quarter this year. µ
Comments
But
Don't they mean upgrade to XPR500
This is not a new model, just a new version with an 128GB SSD. The R500 is, since its introduction, the lightest notebook. There are models wheighting well below 1 Kg.VGA
If only this laptop has Geforce 9300 with SSD than it is as good as ordinary laptop :).Holy shit son, optical drive included?
Dang, that's amazing - it's so small and light, yet it packs a DVD-RW. Way to go Toshiba :)apples and oranges
not really all that surprising really, if Apple or Lenovo released a 12.1" version of the Macbook air or X300 (both 13.3")would you not expect them to be lighter?downgrade to XP
Why do you keep saying that! its "upgrade to xp" where vista is concerned.A bit.. old?
I must say I am a bit confused. I am reading this article on my R500 (and "lov'in it (tm)(c)(r)(asdfg)") so now the question arises, what is so new? Specially since I bought it early this year and first wanted to buy one in fall 2007. The small screen also sports a very high resolution of 1280*800 native, for such a small screen. Coworkers always squint at it when they stand behind me, as they cant read it from too far away since it is that small, but I have no problem with it, sitting about half a meter from it (using an external keyboard when sitting at my desk). If you want small and light, this is a really good choice and the 8 hours are not far off. If you dim the screen or even turn the back light off with the handy button in the top right, disable the wireless and tell it to use the power saver profile, I think you could even go past the 8 hour mark. I usually hit 6 with the back light on low.WTF!
wtf is this, a Toshiba commercial?inquirer staff getting some extra dough trying to help flog a laptop that has been out forever! (it seems)
nothing to see here..... move along!
Smallest motherboard
I work at a Toshiba depot and have repaired the non ssd versions of these things, the motherboard (including ram and chipset, cpu (not socket) is nearly the size of the palm of your hand. The machines are beautiful but definitly too flimsy, they need the entire casign to be magnesium cause they flex way to much.yet another...
Yet another Inq article that just can't resist taking a poke at Vista, when it has nothing to do with how small the laptop is, or anything. "...thankfuily you can downgrade to XP" but just not Inq style without some poke at Vista. Wonder if anyone at the Inq uses Windows at all? Probably not. If they did, they could at least use Word and spell check every once in a while. Guess the Great Open Office and Linux doesn't support such advanced things as spell check.