Toshiba Portege R500 Notebook Review

One of the most exciting notebooks to come along in the last few months has been Toshiba’s R500. The R500 received a lot of hype right from the start because of a few important distinctions.

First of all, the R500 was (and still is) the slimmest notebook currently available with an optical drive. Its 7mm thick drive allows a total closed system height of just 0.77″. Not long after the initial announcement the R500 made more headlines when different SKUs were announced, one of which (the R500-S5003) was called the world’s lightest 12″ notebook. At 1.7lbs for model with a 12.1″ LCD (though no optical drive) this version of the R500 is obviously an incredible system, though its 64GB solid-state disk also helps to set it apart from the crowd. The R500 also touts the longest battery life of any 12.1″ widescreen notebook…

All told, the R500 is one of the coolest notebooks to come to the US market this year. Its size and weight make it extremely lust-worthy, though it is not the most practical product. Notebooks from the competition are generally not as light and they don’t have the optical drive, but they are free of the some of the R500’s issues and should stand up to more punishment. If you are looking for the lightest possible notebook with the largest possible screen (and who isn’t?) the R500 maybe be worth considering, but products like Sony’s TZ and Panasonic’s W5 are still very tough to beat.

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