Toshiba Portege R500 Introduced

Toshiba today announced the Portege R500, “the worldâ€™s thinnest notebook series with an integrated optical drive”. It is the first notebook to include a 7mm optical drive and the widescreen 12.1-inch indoor/outdoor transreflective backlit LED screen. Toshiba claims the new Portege R500 has world’s longest battery life in a 12.1-inch widescreen notebook class.

The 0.77-inches thin 2.4-pound Toshiba Portege R500 has 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 ultra-low voltage processor with 1.20GHz clock speed, 2MB L2 cache, and 533MHz front-side bus. This ultra-portable is based on Mobile Intel 945GMS Express chipset with the integrated Graphic Media Accelerator 950, which manages a 12.1-inch 1280×800 LED backlight “highbrightness” display. The R500 supports up to 2GB of DDR2 system memory and comes with 120GB 5400rpm SATA hard disk drive. A mentioned ultra-thin 7mm optical drive is a DVD burner.

Toshiba Portege R500 has Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN (802.11a/g/n), Gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth, but it doesn’t include a 56k modem. Toshiba’s new ultra-portable has PCMCIA card slot, Secure Digital slot, three USB ports, VGA output, Firewire, and a fingerprint reader.

Except a “world’s longest” claim, there is no any further information on notebook’s battery life.

The R500 has a magnesium alloy chassis and comes with Windows Vista Business 32-bit (Portege R500-S5002 model) or Windows XP Professional (R500-S5001X model). These configurations are priced at $2,149 and $1,999 respectively.

Later this year, Toshiba will add a solid state drive (SSD) to its Portege R500. Then, the lightest model configuration will weight 1.72 lbs with a 64GB SSD, a 3 cell battery and no optical disk drive.

Rich

I purchased one with 160 Gb HD and 2 GB memory with optical drive. The screen is atrocious – with a very narrow viewing angles and lots of light leakage around the edges so the image is faded. You cannot watch a video on it – especially under dark conditions because of the uneven lighting (it is weird). The keyboard is the nosiest I have ever heard and bends noticeably with each key stroke with a very poor feed back. It takes 5 mins to boot up and will not properly shut down and the battery lasts about 40 mins. This is a brand new PC it gets so hot that you cannot use it after 20 mins (burns your palms). There is a distinct smell as if something is burning (it is still working but the smell is a constant reminder that it might not be soon). It has lots of bloatware pre-installed and you cannot really work on more than one application at a time since it runs out of memory resources. Did I say slow – it is ludicrous – my Asus PC eee 701 seems to run like greased lightning compared to this. Yes it is very light – almost feather light but it also seems very fragile (it might not be) but who was the idiot that put a Kensington lock on the screen which is wafer thin? Avoid, no matter what sort of bargain, pass this one over I have given up even trying to use mine and have returned to using the Asus eee with its 7in screen and keyboard as a far more practical and productive tool.