New Laptops From Toshiba

Toshiba really seems to have stepped up to the plate when it comes to notebooks on both ends of the market: ultra-portable and gaming.

The Portege R500 is Toshiba’s newest addition to the mobile front. Surprisingly this two pound notebook comes with an optical drive which is touted as the worlds thinnest at an impressive 7mm.

Click on for more pics and specs…

The R500 packs some cool features and options such as the available 64GB of SSD storage, which -when combined with the absence of an optical drive- drops weight of the notebook to an incredible 1.72 pounds. The combination of SSD and an LED back lit display apparently provides the R500 with the worlds best battery life at an estimated 10 hours.

Along with the hardware mentioned above, this ultra-portable comes with Bluetooth 2.0 and draft n wireless. A 1.2 GHz Core 2 Duo and standard 1GB of RAM ensure that it’s a good performer to boot.

Starts at $1,999

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Toshiba’s monster 17 inch Satellite X205 comes with all the usual desktop replacement trimmings. Although slightly sub par compared to similar offerings from Alienware, the $1,999 starting price is considerably cheaper too.

The base configuration includes:

– Nvidia GeForce Go 8700M GT with 256MB DDR3of graphics memory

– 2GB DDR2 RAM with 1 gig of Intel turbo memory

– 17″ WXGA display

– Bluetooth 2.o EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)

– 802.11 a/g/n wireless

– HD-DVD ROM

– 4 Speakers with subwoofer

– 240GB of storage 2×120 (sorry no raid!)

For an extra $500 the CPU gets a 200MHz boost, hard drive space gets bumped to 320 gigs (still no raid) and the graphics memory gets upped to 512MB.

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