There is a new review of the Toshiba Portege R500, Toshiba’s latest ultraportable, up on NotebookReview.com
This review is of the LED-backlit Portege R500 with the mechanical SATA hard drive – Toshiba just announced that they are going to offer 64GB Solid State Drives that can drop the weight down to 1.77 pounds (0.8kg).
To get the weight down to the normal under 2.5 pounds (with internal optical drive) and to get a thickness of around 0.77 inches, Toshiba had to make some sacrifices, and JerryJ mentions that:
The build is mostly plastic with some flex most noticeably beneath the right palm rest and the LCD lid. The R500 doesn’t use any type of latch to close the lid, just a firm hinge closing mechanism that works well.
While the design is quite impressive, and build quality is amazing given the thin materials used, our overall feeling is that the R500 is far from rugged. The standard amount of abuse that most notebooks endure with ease would result in a broken R500.
Full review at NotebookReview.com