If you need to travel light and work for hours at a stretch, the Portege 2010 is made for you.
Most notebooks include one battery and two internal drives, but the Toshiba Portege 2010 turns the tables, with just one internal drive and two batteries. The result? An ultraportable notebook that costs just under AU$4,300 and runs for 5.5 hours with both batteries attached. Unfortunately, this laptop can't back up your files to any drive but its own, unless you buy an optional external floppy or CD-RW drive. And the Portege 2010 doesn't win any records for performance, either. But if you travel frequently with your notebook and can live with these trade-offs, this Toshiba combines the uptime that your workaholism craves with the portability that your road trips require.
It's hard to imagine a better attempt at notebook miniaturisation than the Portege 2010. This Toshiba's beautiful, magnesium-alloy case weighs only 1.52kg with both batteries attached, but when you pack your briefcase, you can mix and match components to get just the right combination of portability and working time. For example, the AC-power supply bumps the 2010's total weight up to 1.91kg, but leaving the big battery and the AC adapter at home cuts the total weight to just 500gm. (Note, however, that in ZDNet's tests, the internal battery held out for only 1 hour, 40 minutes.) If you're flying overseas, you could pack a second big battery, which costs AU$218.90 and should extend work time by almost 4 hours.
The notebook itself measures 22.9cm deep and a just under 29cm wide. Without the larger battery attached, this Portege stands only 1.9cm high--just thick enough for Toshiba to load the edges with plenty of ports. The keyboard feels comfortable, and its keys are plenty big, although they're noisy.
We found a few aspects of the Portege 2010's design annoying, however. For one thing, there's no easy place to grip the notebook's edges, so you need both hands to open it--one to press the clasp and the other to get a finger under the lid and lift. The touchpad and the buttons are small, too, even though it looks like Toshiba had plenty of room to make them bigger. The buttons don't give you any feedback when you click them, and the touchpad's cursor control feels sloppy. In addition, this laptop doesn't give you a pointing-stick option.
Other annoyances include Toshiba's placement of the Insert key, which sits next to the spacebar, making it much too easy to accidentally erase ahead as you type. Also, Toshiba's optical-drive options are expensive (a DVD/CD-RW combo costs AU$715) and fill the unit's one PC Card slot--a problem if you need to use that slot for other things, such as a Bluetooth card. Toshiba's optional external floppy drive runs on USB 2.0.
To minimise power consumption, Toshiba built the Portege 2010 around some pedestrian components, but we think that the company made the right choices for the business traveler who wants an affordable and very portable system. For example, the 12.1-inch, diagonal LCD shows 1,024x768 pixels and runs on an integrated CyberAladdin-T graphics controller. The screen has good focus, although colors look somewhat washed out. But since the Portege 2010 sports an 866MHz Intel Pentium III-M processor and doesn't have an optical drive, you shouldn't expect to run high-end CAD software or racing simulations anyway.
A small, raspy speaker on the bottom of the case takes the fun out of watching movies, although there is a headphone jack that can provide good sound if you use high-quality headphones. We're a little disappointed that the Portege 2010 comes with only 256MB of memory, but you can easily unscrew a plate on the bottom and insert another 256MB module. A button on the notebook's right edge turns the Wi-Fi radio on and off (we tested battery time with Wi-Fi off), and next to it live an infrared port and a Type II PC Card slot. The left edge hosts a Secure Digital slot, and the back sports modem and Ethernet jacks, along with a video-out port and two fast USB 2.0 ports. A 40GB hard drive provides room for mountains of spreadsheets and memos.
Unfortunately, you get very few ways to configure the Portege 2010 if you buy it online from Toshiba. You can increase the memory, choose Windows XP Pro or Windows 2000, upgrade the warranty, and buy extra peripherals, but that's it for options.
Other than the aforementioned OS choice, Toshiba supplies only a limited number of apps, including Adobe Acrobat Reader and Windows Media Player.
Don't expect the Portege 2010 to set any performance records; in fact, the notebook finished last in our test group. One of the culprits for the lackluster performance is the system's graphics adapter. The Portege 2010 uses a Trident Video Accelerator CyberBlade XP Ai1, which borrows 16MB of memory from the main system RAM to use as video memory. This significantly diminishes the Portege 2010's performance, which scored below average compared to other 866MHz systems.
In battery life, the Portege 2010 represents both ends of the spectrum. We tested in two ways: with just the internal, small cell installed, then with both the internal battery and the large, secondary cell. With the small 10.8V, 1,600mAh battery, the system scored much shorter battery life than average--more than 100 minutes less than the comparison systems. When we added the 10.8V, 3,600mAh external battery, results changed dramatically. With both cells running, the Portege 2010 lasted nearly six hours, an incredibly long period compared to any system. As long as you don't mind attaching the external battery, the Portege 2010 offers phenomenal battery life.
Toshiba Portege 2010
Company: Toshiba
Price: AU$4,290
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 30 70
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