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Even a Laptop Hater Would Like This Machine

Jonathan Blum

The holiday travel season is upon us, and that often means dragging the dreaded laptop computer to the relatives' house, the mountains or the beach.

I am not a laptop fan. Although laptops are positioned in the market as the ultimate do-everything computer, I've found portable units by the usual suspects -- Dell(DELL Quote - Cramer on DELL - Stock Picks), HP(HPQ Quote - Cramer on HPQ - Stock Picks), Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony(SNE Quote - Cramer on SNE - Stock Picks) and the rest -- to be the exact opposite. They are prohibitively expensive -- at least double the cost of a desktop computer. They come with limited flexibility: Some new memory, and maybe a slide-in card or a hard drive, are about it when it comes to add-on features.

Laptops require pricey, ugly docking stations and other peripherals such as keyboards to make them comfortable for extended use. And when in mobile mode -- for those of us battling repetitive stress and blurring vision -- the ergonomics promote simply awful posture, and the keyboards are cramped to boot.

Yet people still clamor for them. Portable computers are the dominant computer type on the market, by far. In 2003, laptops overtook desktops in terms of market share, grabbing 54% of sales, according to the NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based research firm. And more importantly, NPD says, tech bellwether Apple(AAPL Quote - Cramer on AAPL - Stock Picks) is seeing fresh interest in its laptops. Apple's share of the market grew to about 17% in November.

"People want the instant gratification and total access that a laptop provides," says Craig Marking, senior product manager, who handles part of the laptop line for Toshiba America. "If consumers are willing to pay for it, laptops can offer, feature for feature, the performance of a desktop."

Vendors are delighted to cater to the laptop lust. Innovation continues at a brisk pace. The latest generation of ultra portables -- that is, units that weigh less than 3 pounds -- are getting powerful enough, tough enough and long-lasting enough to travel essentially anywhere and run almost any application, including processing-intensive environments such as Windows Vista and Apple's Leopard operating system.

I have spent the last few months testing one ultraportable, the Toshiba Portege R500 ($2,149 as tested). And basically, the unit works as advertised.

	Toshiba Portege R500
	Photo: Toshiba

My own feeling about the product category aside, there is no denying that the R500 has some simply breathtaking technology. It is 3/4-inch thick, about the size of $1.50 in quarters. It weighs less than three pounds, complete with charging cord and transformer. And it is done in a nice magnesium-alloy case that stood up well to my "executive handling." (Read: It did not scratch or unduly discolor after life in the chaos that is my shoulder bag.)

The R500 has an impressive 12.1-inch transreflective light-emitting-diode display that uses both a backlight like a normal display and reflected light like paper to create an image that has decent clarity in daylight as well as solid performance indoors and in low light.

The R500 I tested came fully loaded with a 7-mm optical drive, full dual-core processor support for up to 1.2 GHz, about 1 gig of RAM with an expandable slot, Bluetooth connectivity and many more features.

Battery life was impressive. I approached the eight-hour working range in full power-saving mode, doing mixed-use business tasks. But when I hooked the computer to a wireless network and ran rich media files like movies that kept the drives spinning and the screen running at full power, battery life dropped dramatically to the still-respectable 3.5 hour range.

Despite all that, my usual issues with laptops are still lurking with the R500. Do not expect to look at the screen for hours on end in reduced-power mode. To save juice, the R500 -- like most laptops -- cuts screen brightness. And clarity takes a major hit. I was fighting eyestrain after just 30 minutes.

All the marvelous engineering to fit these tools into such a small enclosure has its penalties. The keyboard is perfectly acceptable: good key carry and touch. And the company claims it has some spill-proofing built in, though I didn't test it. But Toshiba uses a single touch pad interface to control the mouse and located it very close to the keyboard. So, in certain presets, the mouse can take on a life of its own. In fact, expect the tinker factor to be a bit higher on the R500 than on your average larger laptop. The drives, slots and wireless networking switches are all there -- they are just engineered so finely that they can be a bit challenging to find.

All said, the R500 is a perfectly respectable machine. It is light. It is powerful. As much I hate using laptops in general, it is the unit I am carrying with me now.

And that is saying something.