Toshiba R500 - competitor to Macbook Air or gymnast?

Ever since Apple came out with the Macbook Air ultraportable notebook, competitiors have tried to mimic Macbook Air in terms of size, weight and features (in comparable form factors). Lenovo’s X300, Toshiba’s R500 etc. were some of them.

Checking out Toshiba’s Portege R500, the form factor, flexibility(literally) and weight(1.7 kg pounds) of the ultraportable are impressive. The flexibility of R500 is incredible, if the official video on YouTube is to be believed.

The hardware is terrible (1.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM and Windows XP Pro), but the point of this post was to:

• Show off the amazing flexibility of the display, which we could see in future laptops, and perhaps practical foldable displays are closer than we think.
• Emphasize the extent to which rivals have gone to beat Macbook Air (but fell short in design and specs).

Also see: specs of Apple Macbook Air and Toshiba R500.

Note: The optical drive shown in the picture above is not included in the current version which weighs 1.7 pounds.

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