The Portege 2010 is thin, light and extremely portable, but this kind of efficiency is met with a performance trade-off. Read our Australian review.
If you just looked at the specifications of the Portege 2010, you'd probably wonder what kind of funny herbs the designers at Toshiba had been smoking lately. The Portege 2010 boasts a comparatively slow 866M Pentium III-M, a measly 256MB of memory and a small 12.1in TFT screen. It doesn't come with any kind of optical drive, and if you want to use an external Toshiba optical drive, you'll have to sacrifice the only PC Card slot on offer.
That's hardly a world-beater in today's market of Centrino-based notebooks and hefty desktop replacements, but the beauty of the Portege 2010 lies in its physical design; it's about as thin and light as we're likely to see a notebook, at least until manufacturing methods for screens, cases and hard drives changes significantly. The Portege 2010 is only 22.9cm deep, 29cm wide and a razor-sharp 1.9cm high. That's only just high enough to include a smattering of ports -- USB 2.0, SD Card, audio jacks and a single type II PC Card slot. The Portege 2010 is physically large for an ultra-portable notebook, but we've seen few notebooks with a slimmer side profile.
Being that thin, battery life was always going to be a concern, and Toshiba attempt to rectify this somewhat by supplying two batteries with the 2010. The internal battery is a relatively weak 10.8V, 1,600mAh unit that struggled badly in our tests, while the external battery is a much heftier 10.8V, 3,600mAh unit. The sacrifice you have to make with the external battery is an increase in thickness and weight; with the external battery in place the unit has an unsightly bulge at the back and weighs in at 1.52kg.
Connectivity is an interesting challenge with the Portege 2010. A unit this thin can't support any kind of internal optical drive, and Toshiba's offerings for external drives are both costly and problematic. AU$715 will score you an external 24X CDROM/8X DVD PC Card drive, but with only one PC Card slot, you'd fill all your bays. Given the USB 2.0 ports on the back, we'd be more tempted to go with a third-party USB 2.0 solution and leave the PC Card slot free for other uses. The Portege 2010 does come with integrated 802.11b wireless, so you could also opt to skip the whole cabled-connection universe if your existing network setup supported it.
With its core specifications so low, we weren't expecting great things from the Portege 2010. In our MobileMark 2002 tests, it managed an unimpressive performance score of 81, a slight touch higher than we'd expect for such a low processor/memory combination. It's still a low figure compared to most notebooks on the market today, however.
Battery life without the extra battery was likewise less than impressive, conking out after 103 minutes. Adding the extra battery made the world of difference to its longevity, with the 2010 delivering 346 minutes -- that's five and three quarter hours -- of power before shutting down.
As it stands, the Portege presents an acceptable trade-off between size and power, as long as you don't need frequent access to external drives and can live with either low battery life or a hefty external battery. Pricing remains something of a concern, however; Toshiba's just launched what is in effect the Centrino version of the 2010, the Toshiba Portege R100, and it costs only $110 more. While we don't have full testing finished on the R100 as yet, the slight price disparity makes the Portege 2010 less of a compelling choice, at least until the price drops.
Toshiba Portege 2010
Company: Toshiba Australia
Price: AU$4,290
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9887 6000
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