MWC: Toshiba reveals R-Series ultra-portable notebooks

by Steven Mostyn - Feb 16 2011, 07:53

Despite the current infatuation with trendy touch-screen tablets and ever-evolving smartphones, Japanese titan Toshiba clearly believes there is still plenty of appeal left in the more ‘conventional’ mobile computing market.

More pointedly, the consumer electronics specialist has unveiled a selection of new R-Series notebooks at this week’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona—all of them powered by Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors.

Although Toshiba has not yet detailed the performance associated with Intel’s second-gen Core CPUs, the new Portege R830, Tecra R840, Satellite Pro R850 and Tecra R850 ultra portables boast a selection of lightweight magnesium alloy and hardened resin outer casings, which result in shoulder-weights of around 1.5kg each.

Taking a closer look at each computer’s specifications, the Portege R830 offers a 13.3-inch display, up to 8GBs of DDR3 RAM, up to 640GBs of HDD data storage (7200rpm), a DVD optical drive, Bluetooth 3.0, support for USB 3.0 and HDMI, and up to 14 hours of singe-charge battery life.

The Tecra R840 differs insofar as it has a 14-inch display, while the Satellite Pro R850 and Tecra R850 sport the same hardware specs alongside slightly more expansive 15.6-inch screens (1366x768) and optional solid-state drives (SSDs).

In related news, Toshiba has covered its bases by also using the Mobile World Congress to unveil the follow-up to its not-exactly-successful Folio 100 tablet.

Currently without an official brand name or price point, the device will be powered by NVIDIA’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor and version 3.0 of Google’s Android operating system (a.k.a. Honeycomb).

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