Review: Toshiba Portégé R600

Toshiba's Portégé R600 sets a new standard for lightweight ultraportable laptops, making it an attractive option for workers who need to carry a PC with them.

However, this portability comes with the drawbacks of a short battery life, high purchase cost, and a design that feels like it may break unless handled carefully.

Available since late 2008, the Portégé R600 has a 12.1in display, built-in 3G broadband modem and a footprint approximately the size of an A4 sheet of paper. It is a slim-line design at just 19.5mm thick at the front and 25.5mm at the rear when closed. But it is the weight of this model that is so extraordinary. At just 773g, it feels like picking up an empty shell rather than a fully functioning laptop PC.

This would seem to make the Portégé R600 a dream machine for users such as travelling executives, but it is hard to justify the £1,600 price tag of our review unit. Even the entry-level R600 will set buyers back at least £1,000, which seems steep when you consider that netbooks with 10in screens can be bought for £300.

Toshiba would no doubt argue that the R600 is a professional business tool and that netbooks are consumer products. But, apart from a bigger screen and a larger memory for running more demanding applications, it is difficult to see where all of the extra cost is incurred.

The plastic-looking silver styling also does Toshiba no favours, and in our opinion makes the R600 look cheap and nasty rather than a premium product.

We also had reservations that the lightness of the R600 might make it prone to being easily damaged. The screen, for example, flexes quite substantially, but Toshiba said that the display is designed to do this to prevent damage.

The system also includes a motion sensor to protect the hard disk, and a spill-resistant keyboard as part of Toshiba's EasyGuard features.

Our review unit was a Portégé R600-108, which is based on an ultra-low voltage Core 2 Duo U9400 processor running at 1.4GHz. This model comes with a useful 3GB of memory, plus a 128GB Flash solid state drive.

Other R600 models are available with hard drives ranging from 160GB to 320GB, and with an internal DVD Super Multi drive absent from this model. The latter option pushes the weight up to 1.114kg, which is still impressive for a full-spec laptop.

The Portégé R600 ships with Windows Vista Business edition by default, and we found its performance satisfactory under this, and more than adequate for running applications such as Microsoft Office. With 3GB of memory, it should be capable of handling even fairly weighty Excel spreadsheets, for example.

Under Vista's built-in Windows Experience Index the Portégé is rated at 3.1, but this score is pegged back by the performance of the graphics subsystem. The processor, disk and memory subsystems all showed above average scores.

The low weight of the Portégé R600 means that it is fitted with a relatively small standard battery pack, rated at just 2900mAh. This leads to a distinctly short battery life of just one hour and 25 minutes, as tested under the Battery Eater Pro benchmark.

This is a worst-case figure, so users are likely to see a longer battery life with normal use, but not significantly so. The R600 is not therefore well suited to prolonged use away from a mains socket. Toshiba can supply an optional 5800mAh 6-cell battery for £95, but this will push up the weight of the system. The mains adapter is also standard size rather than a compact unit, so adds noticeably to the weight if you decide to carry it with you.

We were impressed with the R600's 12.1in display, which showed a very clear and sharp image at 1280 x 800 pixels. The keyboard is also good for typing on, with full-sized keys except for the narrow function keys across the top row.

The touchpad below the keyboard is one feature we took issue with. Our review unit came with a driver configured to execute actions when specific areas of the touchpad are swiped, such as going back or forwards a page in the browser.

Consequently, we found that the browser kept uncontrollably jumping to other pages when we were surfing the web. We were able to figure out what was happening and turn this off, but the average user would probably assume the computer was faulty.

Toshiba has equipped the Portégé R600 with a decent array of ports and external controls. It has an external SATA port for connecting storage devices, two USB ports, an SD Card slot for Flash memory, and a full-sized ExpressCard slot for adding plug-in peripherals. It also has a VGA output, audio jack sockets and a volume control wheel.

Connectivity options include 802.11a/g/draft-N Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet and a built-in 3G modem supporting wireless broadband up to a maximum 7.2Mbit/s. A slot for a SIM to enable 3G network access is located inside the recess for the battery pack.

A connector on the underside of the case enables the R600 to dock to a Toshiba Slim Port Replicator II, which provides VGA and DVI outputs, four extra USB ports and an Ethernet port connection to a local area network.

For security, the Portégé has a slot for attaching a chain and a fingerprint swipe sensor between the left and right touchpad buttons.

Pre-installed software on our review unit included a 60-day trial of Office 2007, Google Desktop, McAfee SecurityCentre and an array of utilities including the Toshiba Tempro service that monitors the performance and status of the laptop, and TrueSuite Access Manager for fingerprint log-ins.

In fact, no fewer than a dozen utilities were loaded into the notification area of the taskbar whenever Windows started up, a prime example of the kind of unnecessary clutter that makes computers seem slower than they might otherwise be.