14 DAY TRIAL // With all the recent talks about the future of storage for both portable and desktop computer systems, it comes as no surprise that Toshiba chose to feature its latest Protégé ultraportable laptop with a 128 GB SSD. And, just in case you're not familiar with the Protégé family, the company's new product will also boast a 12.1-inch display. Even more, it only weighs in at 2.4 pounds, which makes this notebook high on portability features.
The company's latest Protégé model has been dubbed R500-S5007V, and is the most recent addition to a series of ultraportable notebooks coming from the company that are meant to provide support mainly to business users.
Toshiba, the world's fifth-largest computer maker, has managed to expand the storage capacity of its SSD-based offer, from the 64GB it offered with another R500 model in 2007, to 128GB with this latest Protégé. However, what is more exciting is that this storage upgrade doesn't raise the starting price tag of $2.999, which should make the offer all the more interesting. Toshiba also managed to keep the same features the previous model had, such as an ultra low volt Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 processor with a 1.33GHz clock speed, 2MB of L2 cache and a 533MHz front side bus.
Toshiba's Protégé can be placed in the same category as Lenovo's X300 and Apple's MacBook Air, as these two products also fell somewhere between ultraportable laptops and standard notebooks. However, according to the IDC, the R500 best fits in the ultraportable category, which has laptops weighing less than 4 pounds that have a 12-inch display, or smaller.
According to IDC, at the moment, ultraportables account for between 8 and 10 percent of the worldwide PC market. But, because of Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 and the MacBook Air, the market is seeing a slow but definite change.