Toshiba Introduces Portégé R500-S5003 Laptop

Toshiba has announced in a press release last week, the introduction of their newest notebooks that incorporates several world's first technologies. Toshiba claims that the Portégé R500-S5003 is the world's lightest notebook while the Portégé R500-S5004 is the world's thinnest notebook.

Weighing in at just 1.72 pounds, Toshiba claims that the Portégé R500-S5003 is the world's lightest notebook. The Portégé R500-S5003 weight would bring it into the category of ultraportable notebooks. Ultraportable notebooks weigh in at less than 1.7kg with typical 12 inch screens. Toshiba's Portégé R500-S5003's lightweight feature can be attributed to its featherweight hardware and the fact that Toshiba eliminated all moving parts from the configuration. The featherweight hardware included in the notebook includes a like a 64 GB solid state hard drive (SSD) and a three cell lithium ion battery. The Portégé R500-S5003 has a 12.1 inch screen, 1.20 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 processor, 1024 MB DDR2 memory, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator, Intel Wireless WiFi link, Bluetooth 2.0 and comes with a pre-installed Windows XP Professional. Customers would have to buy the optical disk drive for the S5003 separately.

According to Toshiba, the Portégé R500-S5004 is the world's thinnest notebook measuring in at just .77 inches thick. The Portégé R500-S5004 has an integrated 7mm DVD Super Multi drive. Like the S5003, the S5004 also has a 12.1 inch screen, 64 GB SSD, 1.20 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator, Intel Wireless WiFi link and Bluetooth 2.0 but the S5004 will have a 2048 MB DDR2 memory and will come with the Windows Vista Business edition.

Although Toshiba is the first to release the World's thinnest notebook, Intel have for some time been developing a .7 inch thick notebook in collaboration with Ziba Design. Intel codenames this notebook, the Intel Mobile Metro and announced it last May 2007 though Intel has yet to mass produce this notebook. Also, Sony's VAIO X505 notebook is only .75 inch thick at its widest point and .3 inch thick at its thinnest point but this notebook has been manufactured 3 years ago and lacks the Portégé's high-end specifications.

$2,699 is what it will cost to own the lightweight Portégé R500-S5003 while the Portégé R500-S5004 has a price of $2,999. Toshiba's Portégé series all comes with a three year standard, limited warranty but customers can choose to upgrade to the four years extended warranty coverage offered by Toshiba.

SOURCE:

Toshiba, Toshiba Launches World's Lightest Notebook. URL: (http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/pressdetail.jsp?editorialoid=391825)