I am sitting here at the local bean shop and I stop to stretch and look around. Sitting on top of a table about five feet away from me is the thinnest and smallest Toshiba notebook I have ever seen. It rivals the Lenovo IdeaPad U110 I am typing on right now but is just a tad wider. I have to go see what it is so of course I do and quickly discover it is the Toshiba R500 notebook. The gentleman I interrrupted is quite happy with it and says it’s a dream to travel with which is important as he does that a lot. What impresses me the most is that even though it is as thin and light and you will see it has an integrated optical drive! That blows me away as usually you don’t have that option on notebooks as thin as the R500. This is the first one of these beauties I have seen in person and I am very impressed.
After bugging the nice man long enough I went online to research the R500 and discovered it is highly configurable. The pricing ranges widely based on the configuration, ranging from $1550 for the base-level model with a 1.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM, 12.1" widescreen (1280×800), 160 GB 5400 rpm HDD, 3 USBs, 1 Firewire, and a bevy of other goodies, to the top of the line $3000 model with lots more stuff including a 128 GB SSD. I am very glad I saw one of these babies in the flesh. Interestingly, the low-end model which is no slouch comes with XP Pro installed. The top of the line comes with Vista Business with a "downgrade copy of XP Pro".
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/07\/25\/toshiba-r500-sp\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_cce63fa968aa1fbb0a777d80f3782a1e","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}