Housing all the power and functionality of larger laptops in a sleek chassis just 20 mm thick and weighing just under 1.6kgs, the Toshiba Portege is an example of why its becoming harder to draw demarcation lines between notebooks and sub-notebooks. That's also the reason why we loved it.
Ignoring the fact the 3490CT's has no internal CD or DVD-ROM drive the standard specification list for the machine that we received for review didn't read like many similar laptops that sacrifice features for portability. Its powered by a 700MHz Intel Pentium III SpeedStep processor, contains 128M of RAM, an 8M S3 Savage IX video controller and a roomy 20G hard drive (an important consideration as richer, larger, business document file formats are becoming increasingly popular).
The absence of a removable disk drive built into the body of the Portege allows it retain its slim 262mm by 231mm by 20mm, dimensions. However, because the bulk has been shaved from the Portege's thickness, rather than its footprint, its keyboard still has ample space for wrist movement key spacing.
By emerging standards, the 700MHz 3490 isn't quite a desktop equivalent but backed-up by 128M of RAM (the standard memory configuration for the unit) we found that the system exceeded our performance expectations. We weren't shocked to find that easly met with the needs of the average user running standard business applications, but its ability to do the same with a number of demanding 3D games surprised us. It has unusually strong all-round performance for a machine tailored for the corporate users. It also bodes well when contemplating how the 3490CT will perform delivering visual presentations.
The Portege's 11.3 inch TFT display is, disappointingly, not quite as large as can be achieved with portables in this class, but it performed well in most other respects. The 3490CT's display is capable of supporting 16 million colours at a resolution of 1024 by 768 and its S3 video card can support this resolution externally. The only noticeable problem with the display was its unforgiving viewing angle. This is an inherent weakness attached to TFT display technology but it seemed exaggerated in the Portege screen; minor angular shifts in its position turned crisp images into washed-out grey shapes.
Lasting just over 2 hours on a single charge our observations of the 3490CT's battery performance fell short of the 2.5 hours recorded by Toshiba's own benchmarking. Portable battery life varies wildly depending on the tasks your performing, but you can safely expect the Portege to operate for around 1.5 to 2 hours without the need to visit a power socket (assuming you're not running video or disk intensive applications constantly throughout that period).
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