Toshiba tops the scales in thin race

Toshiba Computer Systems Division is ahead of the pack with the world's lightest notebook PC - the Portege R500.

Based on the popular Portege platform, the R500 is significantly trimmer than its brethren, measures just 19.5mm in height and weighs less than 1kg, making it one of the thinnest notebooks with a full size screen, keyboard, and optical drive in the industry.

Users will be pleasantly surprised that Toshiba did not lower weight by sacrificing battery power.

According to the company's testing, battery life should last between seven and 12 and a half hours, depending on model type and specific usage.

Making a device thin is not the be all and end all; creating a powerful lightweight computer is what Toshiba was going for. As everyone know, Windows Vista has beefy requirements, and the R500 lives up to the challenge. The 1.20GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 1GB of RAM meets the standard, and the 2MB of L2 cache goes a long way to optimising data traffic to the CPU.

The 12.1" WXGA display is now an industry standard for ultra-portable notebooks, and is coupled with an Intel graphics chip that shares most of its memory with the system's RAM. While these types of notebooks have come a long way in terms of graphics capability, it is not intended for serious graphic design work or gaming.

On the other hand, the R500 is perfect to perform daily business tasks such as email, word processing, and giving detailed presentations.

Toshiba can claim another first, the R500 is the world's first notebook computer to incorporate an indoor/outdoor transflective diagonal widescreen LED backlit display. This enhances viewing in virtually any type of lighting: indoors, the LED backlit enriches colour and quality, and outdoors the transflective screen uses natural sunlight to enhance images.

Of course, as a fully functional notebook, the slim Toshiba has all the interface slots necessary to connect to the myriad of peripherals that make up the modern computer experience. These include a PCMCIA card slot, an RGB port, three USB 2.0 slots, one IEEE 1394, and one SD card slot.

Internet connectivity should be a breeze given that it has wireless LAN 802.11 a/b/g/draft-n, and 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN support.

The notebook comes in a sleek silver design with blue illuminated front edge display, and is on sale for US$2300.

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