William Maher27 February 2008, 11:16 PM
Toshiba claims a whopping maximum of 12.5 hours for this tiny sub-1kg machine, and it’s an impressive figure — trouble is, we don’t think it’s anywhere realistic.
We got about five hours of battery life with our review unit, which included a solid state hard drive. That is stonkingly good performance — most machines we review don’t come anywhere near that mark. Still, it’s less than half the quoted battery life. In Toshiba’s case they recommended we turn off the screen backlight and turn Wi-Fi off — it saves battery life, but it makes the screen difficult to see indoors.
We tried Toshiba’s approach, but the closest we achieved was nine hours, twenty minutes. That sounds great till you consider the notebook screen was dark, and we left the machine idle the whole time. Using the same power save settings, but turning on Wi-Fi and making the screen brighter, occasional use saw the battery last for five hours.
Battery gripes aside, this is still a great machine. It’s very light and skinny thanks to the LED backlit screen and slim optical drive. The screen is 12.1in, and our review model came with Intel’s Core 2 Duo ULV UT7600 chip (1.2GHz), 2GB RAM and a 120GB drive. Like most subnotes, performance isn’t great in power-saver mode, but it copes with basic desktop tasks.
The R500 is more expensive than LG’s 1kg A1 Express Dual, which you can find online for just under $3,000, though the value’s reasonable, considering the LG we had 1GB RAM, an 80GB drive and a smaller screen.
It can’t match 13.3in portables like Dell’s XPS M1330, though, which pack in much faster components for under $3,000. The only advantage for the R500 is size.
A note about the slimline optical drive: we had several faulty drives. Normally we’d put this down to a dud machine, but after seeing several duds, we started to wonder why. These notebooks had been used before, so there’s no telling if they were faulty out of the box. Be sure your retailer will accept returns.