Lithe laptop makes light work of travel

By PETER GRIFFIN

It's a sense of embarrassed panic you experience when you're dashing through a crowded airport and suddenly remember you have a laptop bouncing around in your carry bag.

You see, usually you drag your laptop from one meeting or airport lounge to the other, a constant reminder that the millstone of work is with you.

But if the Machine you're carrying is lighter than the bag it's carried in, the liberation is dramatic.

Toshiba's new Portege 2010 has to be one of the lightest (around 500 grams on its own) and thinnest laptops in the world - just under 2cm when closed according to my ruler.

Hence, you start treating it like something it isn't.

You carry it under your arm like a book, wave it in the air as you gesture, balance it on the arm of your chair.

None of these practices are recommended for a complex piece of computer hardware, but they are things the dimensions of this laptop encourage you to do.

The 2010 is based on Intel's 866MHz Pentium III mobile processor and comes with a standard 256MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. A sturdy metal casing protects its 12.1 inch colour screen.

It's not an exceptionally powerful laptop but most of us rarely use the full power of our computers, especially when we're on the move.

The 2010 will play video smoothly (though the inclusion of a relatively low-powered Trident chipset has been criticised), run games and handle all of the Windows applications most of us use - sometimes all at once.

The stripped-down dimensions, of course, come with trade-offs.

The internal battery will not give you as much computing time as laptops with chunkier battery units - although the 2010 does come with a light-weight external 10.8 volt battery that docks with the machine to give several hours additional battery life. The internal battery squeezed out just under 1 1/2 on average.

There's no room for internal drives - CD-Rom, CD-RW, DVD and floppy drives all come as external units you plug in. That's fine by me. Who uses floppy disks anymore?

The 2010 is fitted with an SD card slot which will give you removable storage the size of a postage stamp. But you'll really have to invest in an external CD-Rom/DVD drive and they aren't cheap ($730 plus GST).

The press of a small button enables the inbuilt "WI-Fi" which will let you connect to a wireless network. Just wait until wireless internet "hotspots" become more pervasive. Then the only cable you'll take on the road with you is the power lead and adaptor.

Thankfully Toshiba has removed the "nipple" navigating button of previous models that used to sit square in the middle of the keyboard.

Instead a touch pad acts as a virtual mouse. It takes some getting used to but is far easier to use.

VGA, modem, infra-red, ethernet, PC card and two fast USB 2.0 ports are all squeezed in for peripheral devices.

The guts of the 2010 are also included in the R100, a laptop released this week with the new, power-efficient Centrino chipset from Intel featuring a more powerful 900MHz processor.

Toshiba Portege 2010
Pros:incredibly thin and light, great for travellers, good connectivity options and WiFi enabled.
Cons: internal battery life short, peripherals expensive.
Rating: 8.5/10
Price: $4495 plus GST. ($4610 plus GST for the R100)