Toshiba Portege R500 Introduced

Toshiba today announced the Portege R500, “the world’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 “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.

Press Release

[…] Toshiba yesterday announced the addition of a 128GB solid state drive (SSD) into the Portege R500 12.1-inch ultraportable laptop. […]