Toshiba Portege R500 - Expert Reviews

Review summary: Toshiba Korea has been lauch their new notebook series Toshiba Portege R500. With display 12.1 inch, Portege R500 is all-in-one notebook feature 20g weight

Pros: Incredibly thin and light ; built-in optical drive ; impressive battery life ; comfortable keyboard

Cons: Merely adequate performance ; no option for built-in Webcam or wireless broadband ; only one speaker ; case feels too flexible

Verdict: Toshiba's Portégé R500 is an amazing ultraportable laptop with only a couple of minor shortcomings keeping it from perfection.

Pros: Extremely thin and light, Excellent battery life, Includes optical drive

Cons: No mobile broadband, Optional solid state hard drive drives up price, Limited configuration options

Verdict: Toshiba's much-anticipated Portege R500 may be the best ultraportable laptop available right now, but mobile broadband is conspicuously absent.

Review summary: They say there's no such thing as too thin, but Toshiba's latest ultralight, the Portégé R500, may be taking things to Nicole Richie-esque extremes. The lightest notebook on the market, we thought the scale was broken when weighing the lithe machine. ...

Pros: Loaded with ports: USB (three!), PC Card, Firewire, and an SD card reader. Not exactly a powerhouse, it at least survived our gaming benchmarks-10.2 fps on Quake 4. Big hard drive (120GB) for a laptop of this size. Respectable battery life: 2 hours, ...

Cons: Ultra-tiny mouse buttons are just way, way too small. Somewhat dim screen. We'd prefer two adjacent USB ports, instead of haphazardly placing them around the sides.

Review summary: We'll just call it the God notebook, OK?