After Apple, Lenovo and HP, now it’s Toshiba’s turn to
unveil its lightest, thinnest laptop. Called Portégé R500-S5007V, the new
ultraportable from Toshiba weighs 2.4 pound, it is as thin as 0.77-inches and it
is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor U7700 with 2MB cache.
Its basic configuration includes 2 MB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM and as for storage
solution Toshiba opted to include 128GB solid state drive.
With its 128GB solid state drive, offers more storage space
than Lenovo’s X300 or HP’s Voodoo Envy 133, which offer 64 GB SSD.
SSDs feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application
start-up times than hard disk drives. SSD can also improve battery life by up
to 20 percent in notebooks. Although, with no moving parts, the flash-based SSD
starts working almost immediately to achieve far better access speeds than a
conventional hard disk drive. For example, in notebook computers, data moves to
and from an SSD more than 100 times faster than data moving to and from a hard
disk. As a result, notebooks equipped with a SSD can boot Microsoft Windows
Vista Enterprise in less than a minute.
Of course, Toshiba offers also versions with hard disks in
the 120GB to 160GB range.
Unlike MacBook Air, which offers the DVD drive as an
external unit, Toshiba Portégé R500-S5007V includes a 7 mm DVD SuperMulti drive.
Toshiba claims that its Portégé R500-S5007V can be used in
direct sunlight, thanks to its
12.1-inch transreflective LED backlit display. Outdoors, the
transreflective screen lets the sun’s light pass
through and reflects it out to bring the images on the display to life so users
can switch off the LED backlighting while outdoors and decrease overall battery
consumption. The graphic solution is based on Intel Graphics
Media Accelerator 950.
Also, the Japanese electronic maker said that the battery of
Toshiba Portégé R500-S5007V offers eight hours of work on a single charge,
according to the measurements made with MobileMark.
Last week, in Berlin,
HP launched Voodoo Envy 133, which is based on Intel Centrino technology and it
has a 13.3-inch diagonal LED WXGA screen capable of 1,280x800 resolution.
Toshiba Portégé R500-S5007V the SSD version will be available for $2,995, while the
version with classic hard drive wilt be with $ 1,000 cheaper.
Vooodoo Envy 133 uses the same processors as MacBook Air and
Lenovo ThinkPad X300: the Intel SP7700 and SP7500.
