Move along Macbook Air, there's another skinny notebook that aims to take the market by storm. Toshiba announced on Jun 18 a new version of its Portege R500 ultraportable, the Portege R500-S5007V. 
The Portege R500-S5007V measures 0.77-inches at its thinnest point and weighs 2.4 pounds, making it one of the thinnest and lightest laptops, says the company. Considering Apple's Macbook Air weighs 3 pounds, while Lenovo's Thinkpad X300 weighs around 2.93 pounds; which means that the new Toshiba Portegee could, in fact, be the thinnest notebook today.
And, the laptop features solid state drive (SSD) capacity of 128GB. A staple of the Portegee R500 series, the R500-S5007V too, comes with built-in 7mm DVD SuperMulti drive.
It has a widescreen 12.1-inches transreflective LED backlit display. When used outdoors, Toshiba explains, the transreflective screen lets the sunlight pass through, reflecting it out to bring the images on the display alive so that users can switch off the LED backlighting and decrease overall battery consumption.
Toshiba claims that you can get more than eight hours of battery life with this laptop after a single charge, when used for normal computing. The laptop also incorporates Toshiba's EasyGuard Technology for security, which includes advanced encryption, multiple level passwords, and a fingerprint reader.
The following is Portege R500-S5007V's recommended configuration:
- Genuine Windows Vista Business (32-bit version)
(Downgrade media for Genuine Windows XP Professional)
- Intel Core 2 Duo Processor U7700
(1.33GHz, 2MB L2, 533MHz FSB with 64 bit)
- 2048 PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM
- 128GB Serial ATA solid state drive
- 12.1-inches diagonal wide-screen high brightness display
(1280 x 800 (WXGA) - Transreflective backlit LED)
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
- 7mm, 8xDVD-SuperMulti (+/-R Single Layer) drive supporting 9 formats
- Intel Wireless Wi-Fi Link 4965AGN
- Intel PRO/1000 - 10/100/1000 Ethernet
- Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
Which sums up to an estimated price of Toshiba Portege R500-S5007V as $2,999, along with a 3-year standard limited warranty.
