The dazzling Toshiba Portégé R100 notebook is an impressive 2.4-pound ultra-ultraportable (most ultraportables weigh 3 to 4 pounds) with a full-size keyboard, 40GB hard drive, and 12.1-inch XGA display. The only flaw in this otherwise impeccable system is low battery life—an unavoidable trade-off given the systems diminutive size.
The R100 is Toshibas follow-up to last years breakthrough—the Toshiba Portégé 2000 family. The R100 continues the useful features found in those systems, such as a full-size keyboard (virtually unheard in notebooks under 3 pounds), an external switch that controls the internal wireless Ethernet, a bright polysilicon display, and an ultracompact 1.8-inch hard drive (which is 40GB in the R100 versus 20GB for the 2000 family).
New to the R100 is a Presentation button that lets you quickly set up for a PowerPoint show. And performance from the R100s 1.0-GHz Pentium M processor (19.6 on Business Winstone 2002) trumps the Portégé 2010s score of 13.9. Performance from the R100s integrated Intel 802.11b wireless adapter was acceptable, though throughput was was generally slightly below that which weve seen on larger notebooks.
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