Earlier this year, Apple’s Steve Jobs had the audience of the MacWorld Expo gasping with astonishment over the announcement and subsequent unveiling of the MacBook Air. Steve pulled the ultra light notebook from a yellow document envelope, proudly exclaiming that his engineers had created the world’s thinnest ultra portable notebook making the crowd giddy with excitement. Steve then explained that the high end MacBook Air would utilise a solid state hard drive giving faster disc access than a regular notebook hard drive and everyone cheered again – veryone except other notebook manufacturers who realised that they had some catching up to do.

Fast forward to today and Toshiba have released the Portege R500, an Ultra Portable Notebook that’s half as light as the already impressive MacBook Air, has greater expandability and features the same solid state storage. Toshiba’s engineers have not only caught up, they have overtaken Apple.

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The Portege R500 is equipped with a 12” Transreflective LCD that reflects most of the sunlight it is exposed to, and automatically increases or decreases the light emanating from the screen depending on your lighting conditions making it ideal for use in all environments. The keyboard has comfortable key travel and the full sized touch pad is responsive to use for instances when an external mouse is not available. The notebook is finished in attractive silver, which my fashion sources inform me is ‘The New Black’ and the whole package weighs an astonishingly light 780 grams, roughly the weight of 3 blocks of chocolate.

Like the high end MacBook Air, the R500 comes equipped with a solid state hard drive rather than a traditional platter based hard drive, the benefits of which include faster start times, silent operation and lower power consumption. The lack of moving parts almost eliminates the possibility of mechanical failure and gives the drive the ability to endure extreme shock, high altitudes and extremes of temperatures. Handy if the R500 falls off your mountain goat while you’re climbing Everest, or if you just tend to be a bit clumsy with your belongings.

The R500 uses a Ultra Low Voltage Core 2 Duo CPU for its processing tasks, helping to keep the notebook cooler than George Clooney in a bathtub of ice, while giving it an unprecedented battery life of up to 8 hours. The 945 Chipset uses traditional DDR2 667 RAM, making RAM upgrades inexpensive when compared to other non standard configurations. The CPU comfortably handles Vista Business or the system can be rolled back to Windows XP using the discs included free in the package, making the R500 perfect for mobile business people.

As discussed earlier however, it is what Toshiba includes in this incredibly light weight package, that makes it really stand out. The R500 has built in Gigabit LAN, 3 USB 2.0 slots, a Type 2 PC Card Slot, a Biometric Fingerprint Reader and standard RGB outputs. For communications, the R500 also has Wireless A/G/N and Bluetooth V2 built in. An external dual layer DVD Burner is also available for users not yet willing to make the jump from optical storage to silicon or online based solutions.

Ultimately, the R500 is the new benchmark for Ultra Portable Notebooks, competing with full sized notebooks in terms of power and features, whilst weighing less than any notebook currently available.

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Brett Fitzgerald