Editor's Note: This review is from our sister site, CNET.com. Some models mentioned in this review may not be available in Australia.
Perhaps the laptop we've been most looking forward to checking out this year, Toshiba's Portege R500 is very close to the final word in ultraportable systems. Incredibly thin and light, it manages to squeeze a 12-inch display into a package even lighter than Sony's 11-inch VAIO TZ150.
While there have been some less expensive ultraportables we've liked recently (such as the Averatec 1579), both the R500 and VAIO TZ are premium products, with configurations ranging from AU$3,300 to AU$4,125, thanks to high-end options, including solid state hard drives. While the VAIO and the R500 have similar prices and features, there are trade-offs. We were disappointed by the lack of mobile broadband in our R500, but we also found it offered better performance than the VAIO (largely Sony's fault for packing their system with enough bloatware to slow it to a crawl).
In the end, the battle between these two high-profile ultraportable laptops is close enough to call it a draw, with Sony getting points for battery life, mobile broadband, and overall size, and the Toshiba Portege R500 winning in performance and weight.
Design
We got our first glimpse at the R500 a few months ago, at a furtive restaurant meeting, where Toshiba's reps insisted on sitting at a backroom table, so no one could spy the R500 prototype they carried. Cast in a matte silver, with an ultrathin LED backlit display, the R500 is impressively small, especially for a system with a built-in optical drive. Its footprint is slightly larger than the VAIO TZ150, the recently released Sony laptop the R500 will inevitably be most closely compared to, but the larger Toshiba is actually lighter by quite a few grams.
The R500 manages to fit in a decent-sized keyboard which made for comfortable typing, and even avoids the annoying ultraportable trap of eliminating important keys, squeezing in separate page-up and page-down keys (always important for laptop Web surfing). A fingerprint reader sits between the two mouse buttons, but unlike the VAIO TZ, there's no Webcam. Aside from brightness mode button and a button for launching Toshiba's proprietary help utility, there are no quick-launch or media controls on the keyboard tray.
The 12.1-inch display has a native resolution of 1,280x800, lower than that of the smaller VAIO TZ screen, but we think its just right for a laptop this size. Anything higher, and text and icons become hard to see without going through the hassle of zooming in or changing the resolution (laptop screens should always be run at their native resolution for best image quality). The R500 had a matte screen, which we generally prefer, but the antiglare coating made for terrible off-angle viewing.
Features
With a laptop this small, there are inevitably concessions to be made in terms of ports and connectivity. In this case, we were disappointed to see only an SD card slot, instead of the multifunction card readers found in most laptops. But our main complaint was the lack of a mobile broadband antenna, or even the option for adding one. You'll have to find a PC Card antenna from your mobile provider in order to add this functionality aftermarket, as EV-DO is rapidly becoming a must-have for mobile professionals. Toshiba is planning updated versions of the R500, which will no doubt include this missing feature.
The Toshiba Portege R500 is available in two different fixed-configuration models. The main differences between our AU$3,300 R500-00V01X and the AU$4,125 R500-SP101X is the solid state drive inside. While we love the idea of solid state hard drives -- less heat, no moving parts, low failure rate -- they are still too expensive to be taken seriously, adding AU$825 for swapping in a 64GB SSD drive. But next to LED backlit displays, the move to solid state hard drives is clearly the next big thing in laptop development.
Performance
Intel's line of ultra low-voltage Core 2 Duo CPUs are designed to work in small laptops where heat and battery life are key concerns. Therefore, they're not the speediest processors available, and laptop users can experience slowdown and stuttering even under the best of circumstances. The Core 2 Duo U7600 is a step above the U7500 in the Sony VAIO TZ150, and soundly bested the VAIO in each of our benchmarks. In particular, start-up time, interminable on the VAIO TZ, was much better on the R500 (note that the VAIO was bogged down with a ton of bloatware and anecdotally ran much smoother when we cleaned it up).
In hands-on testing, we had a largely smooth experience with the R500, but we did run into more occasional slowdown and stuttering (especially when running multiple applications) than you would find in a laptop with the faster, more power-hungry T7000 series of Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs. Our only major performance issue with the R500 was a slightly wonky Wi-Fi card, which seemed to cut in and out randomly. We're going to test a second unit's Wi-Fi capabilities and will update this review with the results.
A tiny ultraportable laptop lives or dies based on battery life. After all, there's no point in carrying one of these systems around all day if you have to bring an A/C adaptor with you everywhere. The Portege R500's battery was especially impressive, lasting three hours and 48 minutes on our DVD battery drain test. That's second only to the Sony VAIO TZ (by about 20 minutes) out of recent ultraportable laptops. Our DVD battery drain test is especially intense, so you can expect closer to five hours from casual use, which should be enough for all but the most demanding users. We'll take long battery life over a slight performance bump any day of the week.
Toshiba includes a three-year standard warranty with the R500, as we would expect for a premium-priced system like this, and in Australia/New Zealand offers a complimentary pick-up and return service.
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What's your problem re resolution?
"...but we think its just right for a laptop this size. Anything higher, and text and icons become hard to see without going through the hassle of zooming in or changing the resolution"
Every operating system lets you TURN UP THE FONT SIZE. Wow, now your text is the same size it would be with a lower res screen - but PROPERLY SHAPED and SMOOTH. Icons really shouldn't be an issue unless you're pretty hard of vision and unwilling to wear appropriate corrective devices.
Actually modern OSes even automatically render 12pt text as 12pt (pt is a measure of physical size, 1/72 in) rather than converting it to pixels on a fixed and incorrect ratio like Windows XP.
Changing the resolution is pratically never the right solution. Just turn up the font size a little by telling Windows to render fonts at their correct physical size with the Large Fonts option. Windows XP lets you tell it that you want it to use the display's REAL resolution, eg 140dpi or whatever, instead of intentionally getting it wrong and assuming 96dpi like it does by default.
So please, stop encouraging the manufacturers to put cheap low resolution screens on their products. 800 high is barely usable these days since many apps unfortunately use fixed pixel-specified layouts that assume higher resolutions. I'd love a 1680x1050 or 1440x1050 display on a 11" or 12" laptop - and panels that dense appear on larger laptops. They just seem depressingly absent from the ultraportable market. Since Vista has improved high-res display handling, and XP is already OK at it if you have a clue or your laptop is sensibly preconfigured, there's no need to cripple high end hardware with low res displays anymore.
This is similar to the bizarre practice of putting VGA connectors on modern laptops. DVI is marginally larger (and HDMI is much smaller!), and much better. Most importantly, DVI->VGA adapters work very well, but VGA->DVI adapters produce suboptimal results. Why force the user into an A->D->A conversion path? It's bewildering that you didn't even mention the external display options.
You can get detailed specs here:
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/channel/productDetail.jsp?oid=1760806
so you too can marvel at the bewildering design choices made in this otherwise OK laptop.
The other shortcomings, such as a last-generation chipset with crippling RAM limits and slow graphics (you do NOT want Vista on this thing), the lack of a high capacity battery or modular bay with battery support, and other issues make this a pretty poor offering - especially for the price.
The good: - Fast CPU - Battery life - Bright backlight - Gigabit ethernet (the fact that this isn't universal now is amazing) - Bluetooth, 802.11n - PCMCIA
The bad: - 1.5GB max RAM is pathetic - Last-generation chipset with GMA950 graphics - Low res display - Lacks DVI - No extra-capacity battery available - Can't replace optical drive with secondary battery - No ExpressCard -