The Toshiba Portégé R400-100

If you appreciate the beautiful things in life and go weak at the knees over sleek design, this should get your heart racing.


If you appreciate the beautiful things in life and go weak at the knees over sleek design, this should get your heart racing.

If you appreciate the beautiful things in life and go weak at the knees over sleek design, this should get your heart racing.

Billed as the world’s first Windows Vista Ultimate-based notebook, this stunner measures less than three centimetres in height and boasts an ultra-light 12” widescreen shell. Costing £1,399 (exc VAT), it has a striking black and white colour scheme and includes a digital front-edge display, upon which alert notifications, email headers and calendar updates appear. So you don’t even have to open it up to keep an eye on your emails – handy when you’re on the move.

In fact, it doesn’t even need to be fully switched on. With Microsoft Active Notifications, the Portégé R400-100 can automatically check and download full emails with attachments, as well as checking, updating and synchronising calendar items over a 3G network, even when it is closed or the operating system is in suspend mode.

A rotational hinge allows you to flip the TFT display, which is backlit by LEDs, and use the laptop with a stylus as a tablet notebook. On the technical side, the 80 GB hard drive may seem quite small but, that aside, it does look very cool indeed – which is the most important thing.

Marc Barber

Marc Barber

Marc was editor of GrowthBusiness from 2006 to 2010. He specialised in writing about entrepreneurs, private equity and venture capital, mid-market M&A, small caps and high-growth businesses.

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