Toshiba parties with lighter laptop and Android smartbook

IDG News Service - Toshiba has spent the last 25 years refining the basic laptop design of flat screen, x86 processor, full-size keyboard and removable storage. Its Portégé R700 will continue that tradition when it goes on sale next quarter, but two other new portable computers Toshiba will release around the same time take the company in new directions.

It was in 1985 that Toshiba launched what it calls the "first mass-market laptop," the T1100. That battery-powered IBM-compatible portable PC had an Intel 80C88 processor, an LCD screen and a floppy disk drive. At 66 millimeters thick and weighing 4.1 kilograms, it was a far cry from the thin and light laptops of today.

Apple defined the thin-and-light category in 2008 with its MacBook Air, which weighs 1.36kg and has a 13.3-inch screen, but no optical disc drive.

Since then, challengers have appeared, including the Lenovo IdeaPad U350 and the Dell Adamo. Toshiba, meanwhile, has been whittling its Portégé R series down in size, but not in function, and when the R700 goes on sale next quarter the lightest model will weigh just 1.3kg. The R700's tapered case, 25.7 mm at its thickest point, has room for an optical disc drive (an external add-on for the slimmer MacBook Air).

The R700 will run for up to eight hours on a single charge of its six-cell battery, according to Thomas Teckentrup, Toshiba's general manager of product development and strategy.

It has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit screen, a VGA Web cam and a fingerprint reader, and runs Windows 7. Connectors include HDMI and VGA for external displays, a docking port, Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA and three USB ports (compared to just one on the MacBook Air.)

Different countries will see the R700 in different configurations, with Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 processors and up to 8GB of DDR3 DRAM. Other options will include 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 wireless networking, a hard disk up to 500GB in capacity or a solid-state drive up to 512GB, and a built-in DVD-RW drive, either single- or double-layer. The Portégé range is aimed at business users, but the same computer will also sell to consumers as the Satellite R630, minus the fingerprint reader and docking connector.

Teckentrup wouldn't name a price for the R700, saying it would vary by country and options chosen, but said it will be less than the R600 it replaces.

While the R700 follows Toshiba's full-function laptop tradition, the other two devices it is releasing to celebrate the T1100's 25th anniversary take it in new directions.

The AC100 is a "smartbook", a netbook built with hardware and software more usually found in smartphones. Forget Windows on Intel x86: it runs Android 2.1 on an Nvidia Tegra 250 processor with a 1GHz Arm core, and weighs around 870 grams. It has a 10.1-inch LED-backlit screen, 512MB of RAM, two USB ports, an HDMI video output, an SD Card reader and an SSD up to 32GB in capacity.