Toshiba Portégé R500 review

Some laptops are impressive from the minute you pull them out of their boxes.

That can be for various reasons, but one of the best is sheer smallness. Laptops are supposed to be portable, and the more portable a laptop is, the greater the wow factor.

On that basis, wow factor is something the Portégé R500 has in spades. When Toshiba claim this machine weighs just 700g, they're not counting the battery, but even with it included the total is a mere 1.1kg. You'll barely notice it in a bag. It's thin, too: just 2.6cm - a fraction over an inch - at its thickest point when closed.

Pretty portable, then. And, with its bevelled keyboard, silver finish and overall sleek looks, it can give even the best-looking laptops a run for their money. Produce this from your bag and you'll be greeted by a cacophony of wolf whistles from anyone around who knows their tech kit.

Not only is the Portégé easy to take out with you, but it'll continue running until you're ready to come back. On battery power, we got an amazing six hours and 19 minutes of light use (tasks like word processing that don't tax the processor or drives too much). Even when we kept the machine humming at the limits of its performance, we couldn't wear it out in less than two-and-a-half hours.

Inevitably, all this portability comes at a cost. Not so much a financial cost: choosing an extra-small laptop will always hurt your wallet, but compared to other top-brand models in this size bracket, the R500 is at least a couple of hundred pounds cheaper than you might expect. What you don't get for your money is top performance. Toshiba has used a processor that requires very little power, which is part of the reason battery life is so good. But, as our benchmarks showed, there's a good reason why typical laptops use higher-powered chips. The R500's results weren't catastrophic, but you wouldn't want to use this machine for highly demanding tasks or try to run more than one high-end application at a time.

The screen is another sticking point. On the one hand, it's very easy to see, even in tricky lighting, such as a bright day on the move. Toshiba has made it transflective, giving it the best outdoor visibility of almost any laptop we've reviewed. The 12.1-inch size and 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution are both practical enough for an everyday laptop.

On the other hand, the display also has its limitations. Viewing angles are distinctly limited, so you have to keep the screen and your head at the correct angle to each other (tricky when you need to show someone else your work), and the backlight is uneven, which means some areas of the screen appear darker than others. That's disappointing, and not only does it make the R500 poorly suited to creative work or presentations, it also makes it less usable as a media player. It's impressive that Toshiba has managed to fit in a fully fledged DVD writer, but with this screen, relaxing in front of a film isn't as much fun as it ought to be.

Burning ambition

Perhaps the worst problem is the amount of heat generated by the Portégé. In the quest for silence and long battery life, Toshiba has sacrificed nearly all the fans you'd normally expect to find in a laptop. That means you'll never need to risk scowls in meetings or on public transport, but it does mean, not surprisingly, that the R500 gets unbearably hot. There's a warning sticker about this on the underside, and we found that even during mundane tasks such as browsing the Internet or opening a Word document the unit became far too hot to touch. If anyone at Toshiba is unclear why this is a problem, the clue is in the word 'laptop'. Even denim-clad thighs weren't immune to the electric grill effect. It's a great shame, because aside from these gripes we can't think of another PC we'd rather have as a companion on a plane.