Jørgen Sundgot secures some time with Toshiba's new Portege M300 ultraportable, boasting an accelerometer-protected hard drive and floating 12.1" LCD.
Joining the existing M100 notebook and the M200 Tablet PC products, Toshiba unveiled the latest addition to its Portege M series at the recent CeBIT fair in March: the M300. Focusing on security, the M300 offers such novelties as a cushioned display, shock-proof hard drive and the ability to block ports from accepting external storage devices - and I had the pleasure of getting to smack it around a bit (don't tell Toshiba).
Sharing most of its specifications with the M100 line, the M300 is powered by a 1.2 GHz Intel Pentium M 753 processor, joined by anywhere between 512 MB and 2 GB of RAM. Delivered with a single hard drive option, the Portege M300 offers 60 GB of hard drive space - and a security feature previously only seen in IBM's ThinkPad line of notebooks.
 | | Toshiba Portege M300 |
Not only cushion-mounted, an accelerometer in the M300 detects a free fall, automatically parking disk heads to avoid damage to data. Similarly secure is the 12.1" TFT display of the notebook, which unlike other models is not secured to the lid with screws but rather floats in a cushioned setup, offering XGA resolution.
Powering the display is an Intel 855GME chip which draws up to 64 MB of memory from the main array to perform its duties, enabling an internal video resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels and supports external resolutions at up to 2048 x 1536 pixels. For optical storage, the included SuperMulti drive supports CD-RW, DVD+/-RW and DVD RAM.
A number of connectivity options are available, including 4 USB 2.0 ports, an IEEE 1394 jack, CompactFlash, PCMCIA Type II, SD Card and trusty Infrared, as well as an integrated 56K V.92 modem and 10/100 Ethernet. Also, a VGA port offers external display support, and the keyboard of the M300 is apparently splash-resistant; one feature I would have loved to have checked, but resistingly decided not to.
 | | Toshiba Portege M300 |
To ship this month throughout Europe, the Portege M300 on display at CeBIT was fortunately in a state final enough to allow for a quick and dirty test of the hard drive protection feature, which appeared to work flawlessly; also, a bit of semi-discrete violent shaking revealed the floating LCD to work as advertised, too.
Measuring in at 286 x 233 x 33 mm and a positively petite 1.59 KG, you're likely to going to have to pony up in the range of $2650 USD if you can find the Portege M300 in your friendly European neighbourhood - not too bad, considering its advanced security features.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Archive