Lusting after a netbook for the three-pound weight but don’t want to give up too much in terms of size? Sure, you can spend a few grand on a light-and-thin laptop like a Lenovo X301 or a MacBook Air, but Toshiba doesn’t want you to spend that much. Surely that’s why they have a new Portege A600 starting at $1,399 and weighing in at 3.2-pounds.
Maybe it’s unfair to compare the A600 to inexpensive netbooks or higher-priced notebooks that fit in an envelope, but it actually looks like a good compromise. Aside from the lower-than-average weight, it’s 1.18-inches thick at the thinnest point and it does include an optical drive. The size and weight savings partially comes from the 12.1-inch LED backlit display that handles 1280×800 resolution. It should also get decent battery life since it’s running the Intel Core 2 Duo SU9300 at 1.2 GHz. That 45nm chip has a Thermal Design Power rating of 10 Watts, offers 3MB of L2 cache and has an 800 MHz Front Side Bus, so it’s not a total slouch. Intel 4500MHD graphics, 160GB drive at 5400 RPM, 3GB of RAM, 802.11a/g/n, Bluetooth, webcam, a trio of USBs (one is a combo USB / eSATA), an ExpressCard slot and VGA out round out the portable package.
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