Toshiba intros four new Portege machines, Tecra R10

The last Portégé we saw flow from Toshiba's doors was a revamped R500 in July, but now we know why we've been waiting so long for a true new member of the family. Clearly, Tosh has been shoring 'em up, waiting for this day to arrive when it would introduce four newcomers in one fell swoop. Starting us off is the ultrathin Portégé R600, which packs your choice of a Core 2 Duo CPU, 2.14-pound shell, a battery good for nine hours and a price tag ranging between $1,499 and $3,299. The Portégé A600 includes most of the same specs along with a GMA X4500 graphics controller and a more pedestrian price; the Portégé M750 Tablet PC adds in that always-exciting swivel action for those who care. Lastly, we've got the Tecra R10, which features a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo SP9400, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 200GB 7,200 RPM hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 150M GPU and an MSRP of $1,999. No word on when these will head south to the US, but Canadians should be able to indulge soon enough.

[Via GottaBeMobile]

[dark star @ Oct 9th 2008 8:35AM]

thank god these are coming out! i might finally be able to afford the toshiba r500 now!!

[Martin Trautmann @ Oct 9th 2008 8:36AM]

283 x 215.8 x 19.5/25.5 mm

25.5 mm is claimed to be thinnest?

> the Portégé R600 with suggested list pricing between $3299 and $1499 is the world’s thinnest and lightest laptop weighing 2.14lbs

compared to what?

And lightest? How about the Razorbook, Eee PC 701 etc. (netbooks) or Toshiba's own Libretto U100?

Is it the lightest or thinnest with > 12" display?

[alf @ Oct 9th 2008 9:00AM]

Looks exactly like the MSI PR-200 laptop.

[jak0b @ Oct 9th 2008 9:35AM]

what about dvd slot?

[Jash Sayani @ Oct 9th 2008 10:07AM]

TOSHIBA..!!! I have tons of bad experience with After sales service... I have a Satellite M45. It is a higher version with 1.73Ghz Centrino and after service, they changed the motherboard and put a 1.6 GHz Centrino as they thought its the lower version!!!

Also damaged the sides of the body while opening my notebook..... And my DVD-RW is not repaired even after giving it to them for 5 times!! It just says Power calibration failure when I burn a disk....

I'll never buy a TOSHIBA again!!

[Dan Fruzzetti @ Oct 9th 2008 10:28AM]

I have to say I agree with and understand every comment here. And you should understand the R500 models were by far the lightest full-featured laptops available for their time frame. I'm typing this message on an R500 that weighs in at under two pounds; a little more than half a macbook air. It's also lighter than the Eee PC and the other netbooks, which I find amusing in many ways; not to mention it's a lot slimmer and works more like you'd expect.

I have also had a bad experience with their service. Now I have to say I spent a long time investigating and discovered that while Toshiba didn't put any viruses on my computer, I got a lot of false positives from a bunch of garbage they installed without my permission and the most important problem here was that when I told them it needed a new motherboard, they still managed to delete 10+ gigabytes of personal photos and videos (like of my wife and me during our recent pregnancy -- our first child was born and I lost most of the documentation). I would say I should have backed it up but upon cracking open the case I learned the SSD is coverless in there and has a flat ribbon cable connected directly to one of those little pressure headers. I had no way to back it up. :(

See http://www.fruzzetti.org/toshiba for the more complete picture.

[ynohtna @ Oct 9th 2008 12:49PM]

I've never sent a laptop back with my data. I always give them the fresh out of the box install.

You don't have to take the drive out to back it up...

[bobw @ Feb 25th 2009 11:35AM]

I think you mean "storing them up". "Shoring them up" would mean they were improvising structural reinforcement.

[Harmen @ Oct 9th 2008 1:38PM]

I own a r500 and it's the most flimsy notebook I have. I broke it once and repairs took about 4 weeks. The screen has a really narrow view-angle. Next one will be a nice Lenovo again.

[aznofazns @ Oct 9th 2008 2:01PM]

Is it just me or does this thing beat the pants off the Sony TT in terms of size, weight, and bang-for-buck? The only main difference between the two is the Blu-ray drive and DDR3 memory on the Sony... and I don't think that's enough to make $4449.99 a reasonable price.

[Dan Fruzzetti @ Oct 9th 2008 4:18PM]

@ynohtna:

Seriously? You read "it needed a new motherboard" as "it would have been possible to back it up and restore it to its original state?" The machine would light up for about half of its boot sequence before auto-killing and flashing an error message on the LEDs at the front of the trackpad. And as I said, I had no way to get the data off the disk because of the ribbon cable (as opposed to a regular sata setup -- clearly used for its compactness).

I considered just leaving the disk out and sending it back minus a hard disk, but the warranty paperwork essentially forbade that (stating they reserve the right to not perform service on it if it's been 'tampered with'). So instead I spoke to the actual tech doing the actual work, and she assured me she would not touch the filesystem. If you read the link I posted before, you'll see just how right I was in being worried. And if you could have solved my catch-22 I would have paid you to do it :P