Tech for travelling: Because you can only carry so much

By Andrew Lim on 22 February 2008, 4:05pm

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Toshiba Portege R500 ultra-portable laptop
We would be lost without a laptop, but rather than carry about a massive beast such as the HP Pavilion HDX9000, we're rather partial to the Toshiba R500 when it comes to travelling -- especially since it only weighs 779g.

The R500's lightness and thinness makes it perfect for popping into a bag -- and unlike the Macbook Air, the R500 has three USB ports, a built-in DVD drive and built-in Ethernet port.

We recently took it out to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where we used it to blog on the move. We found the keypad easy to type on and got at least 3 hours of battery power out of it every day, which suited us fine.

Our only concern is that the chassis is a little on the thin side and does flex a little, but as long as you're carrying it around in a protective case or bag, such as the Crumpler Warm Shower, it shouldn't present any problems.

The R500 comes in two flavours, a hard-disk version and a solid-state version. The latter is lighter but costs slightly more and only holds 64GB of data. Both versions come in at about £1,000 and can be purchased from several online retailers.