Review: Toshiba Portege R500 (NotebookReview.com)

Toshiba Portege R500NotebookReview.com has put together a “First Thoughts Review (Video)” of the Toshiba Portege R500, Toshiba’s latest ultraportable laptop, which was just announced. Jerry Jackson does a video comparison with the Lenovo Thinkpad X61. The Portege R500 uses Intel’s newest Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) processor, the 1.2GHz U7600, with 2MB L2 Cache and a 533MHz Front Side Bus. Amazingly enough, they squeezed in a 7mm 8x Single-Layer DVD Writer, along with a full compliment of ports. It starts at $1999 for the R500-S5001X (Windows XP) and $2149 for the R500-S5002 (Windows Vista). The major difference is the Operating System and the maximum memory – the R500-S5001X maxes out as 1.5GB while the R500-S5002/S5002X maxes out at 2GB.

The Toshiba Portege R500 is a very impressive ultraportable:
– 12.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit LCD Display
– Weighs under 2.5 pounds with internal optical drive
– Will weigh around 1.75 pounds (without optical drive) when a 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD) is offered later this year. Solid State Drives use flash memory nad have no moving parts, increasing durability as well as battery life.

The R500 weighs less than some ultraportable laptops with smaller displays, and weighs less than some laptops with the same size display, which do not have internal optical drives.

Full specifications (Small-Laptops.com)