Toshiba announces Portégé R600 and A600 ultra-lightweight laptops

Posted by Al Warmington on Thu 23 Oct 2008

They're not netbooks, okay?

Toshiba has brightened up T3's morning with a pair of new lightweight laptops. Fleshing out Tosh's lightweight Portégé range, these fully featured lappies pack the latest Intel Centrino 2 VPro CPU and 12.1" display.

The R600 is the star of the show, aimed squarely at people who aren't happy to lug a computing breeze block around their bag. It claims the new title of World's Lightest Proper Laptop, stepping neatly into the shoes of its predecessor, the R500, and weighs a feathery-light 800g.

On top of that, the R600 comes with 3G connectivity built in, for internet browsing on the move.

The chassis is made from a magnesium alloy so that it can be light and resilient to the daily stress of being lugged around inside a laptop bag. It also comes with 3GB of DDR2 RAM and a 128GB SSD; or you can choose a 200GB HDD. Tosh also reckons the Transflective widescreen display makes it easy to see even when used in direct sunlight.

Other features include WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 and an interesting USB Sleep and Charge system that allows you to power up USB devices even when the laptop is shutdown.

If you're more business minded / having your company buy one of these for you, the A600 may be your crack. It weighs a bit more than the R600 at 1.4kg, but that's not going to hold you back too badly.

It shares most of the same specs too, including the integrated 3G, but this time there's no SSD option on offer. Instead you'll have to make do with a 250GB HDD. It also packs a DVD SuperMulti Dual-Layer disk drive, an integrated Express Card reader and SD card slot, and a fingerprint scanner. The standard model only comes with a couple of gigs of RAM, but you can choose to up that to 5GB if you feel the need.

The battery life is going to please jetsetting execs too. You can squeeze over seven hours of run time from a single charge, which should be just about enough to get you through a working day and provide you with a decent excuse not to churn out unpaid overtime.

Both laptops are available from the end of October. The Portégé R600 will cost £1,099, while the A600 comes in at a more credit crunch-friendly £849.

Toshiba