Toshiba's Flatter Laptop
(Another Intel design win for ultra-mobile laptops.)
biz.yahoo.com
By Arik Hesseldahl
In the quest to make notebook computers physically smaller and lighter, but without cutting back on powerful features, there's been a lot of progress of late from Japan's Toshiba .
Last month, the company announced what it says is the world's thinnest notebook. The Portege 2000 may be only two-thirds of an inch thick and weigh only 2.6 pounds, but it's no skinny weakling in the feature department.
One reason it's so small is the hard drive. Toshiba has designed a 20-gigabyte hard drive that takes up only 1.8 square inches of space, making it about half as big as mainstream notebook hard drives.
Another reason is the lithium polymer battery, which is flat as opposed to cylindrical--as other notebook batteries are--though it still delivers a good two hours of power. For use on long flights, it also comes with an extra battery "slice" that provides an additional four and a half hours of use.
The notebook also comes with Wi-Fi wireless networking, which is becoming increasingly useful on the road. More airports and hotels are installing wireless networks, which allow for a fast connection to the Internet without cumbersome wires, every day. But when there's no wireless network handy, there are the usual Ethernet and modem ports handy.
On the outside, the notebook has a tough magnesium alloy casing, which will help it stand up to the constant punishment of travel. Inside it has an Intel Pentium III mobile processor running at 750 megahertz, and it ships with 256 megabytes of memory standard. The thin film transistor display screen, 12 inches diagonal, is designed for increased clarity.
It doesn't have a CD-ROM or DVD drive built in, but it does have four USB ports for connecting external drives. Nor does it have a floppy disk drive. But it also has a slot for the secure digital flash-memory cards, which are quickly becoming as ubiquitous as floppy disks. And SD cards store more data than floppies do anyway.
The Portege 2000 starts shipping this month for about $2,200.
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