Laptop wars: Toshiba goes thin with 128GB solid state drive

Toshiba on Tuesday added a 128GB solid-state drive to its Portege laptop lineup in the latest move toward flash-based drives.

According to Toshiba, its Portege R500-S5007V (gallery right) is 2.4 pounds and is the lightest laptop with a 128GB SSD and DVD SuperMulti drive. Under that logic, any laptop with unique specifications can claim to be the lightest. For instance, the next company with a 140GB SSD can claim to be the lightest. The latest Portege is 0.77 inches thick.

The thin is in crusade was kicked off by Apple and its MacBook Air and was quickly followed by Lenovo, HP and others.

Toshiba, however, is driving home the storage capacity (statement). Many thin laptops expect you to live in the cloud and store information there too--or use attached drives. Toshiba maintains that by including a SSD and 7mm DVD SuperMulti drive that its travel weight is light because you won't have to lug additional drives and cables.

Among the other key points:

• The Portege R500-S5007V has eight hours of battery life.
• Vista Business with downgrade media to Windows XP professional.
• 12.1 inch widescreen high brightness display.
• Intel Core 2 Duo Processor U7700--1.33GHz, 2MB L2, 533MHz FSB with 64 bit.

Toshiba's recommended configuration will run you $2,999.Separately, Toshiba expanded its Qosmio lineup with three laptops for gamers and multimedia users. The big takeaway is that the Qosmio G55 uses the Cell processor developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. This chip is the one used in the PlayStation 3.