Toshiba Portege R830 is a small, powerful laptop for the busy pro

The voice of laptops has been pretty quiet as of late, having been drowned out by the screaming caterwaul of the tablets. Toshiba, however, thinks there's still a place in the world for a laptop that is portable and sturdy and powerful enough for all kinds of tasks. We think it's probably right.

The R830 is best seen as a laptop for the travelling pro. With a 13.3-inch screen slotted into a slim body, this is a laptop that won't put up a fight when being shoved into a bag or even a briefcase. At 1.5kg, it won't break your back when carrying it around either. The R830's 500GB HDD features a 3D impact sensor to protect against data corruption if it receives any knocks during travel.

It's not all portability with this guy, though -- under the hood you'll find "the latest Intel CPUs" (we don't know precisely what these will be, but you can bet they won't be Sandy Bridge chips for a while yet), up to a mighty 8GB of DDR3 memory and a battery life of up to 8.5 hours.

It's a good start for some powerful computing, but it depends a lot on what processor Toshiba decides to put in. Let's hope for a minimum of 2GHz dual-core -- an Intel i5 or i7 perhaps, as we've seen in the ultra-light Samsung ZX310.

The R830 also packs in USB 3 ports for ultra-fast data transfer from your flash drives -- up to 10 times faster than USB 2, in fact.

The R830 is a powerful bit of kit that wouldn't look at all out of place being pulled out in business class on a trans-Atlantic flight. Assuming Toshiba put a decent CPU into this thing it could be looking to take some sales from the well to do folk currently lusting after the ZX310 or even the MacBook Air.

No word on pricing yet, but we should have more information nearer to its release around May.