Toshiba Portégé R600

Again, Toshiba has placed the on-board microphone about an inch into the left wrist-rest area - exactly where you place your sound-muffling palm when working.

Nice design, shame about the colour scheme

Underneath the R600, you'll find the docking port and a memory hatch that, when unscrewed, reveals the machine's single Dimm slot. The R600 has a gig soldered onto the motherboard, with the remaining 2GB on the Dimm. You can take it out and put a 4GB unit in its place, but no more.

The SIM slot is hidden by the 2900mAh battery, which makes up almost the entirety of the back end of the R600.

And here's a key disappointment: running our usual laptop battery life test - PCMark05 looped until the machine shuts down - we got a mere 80 minutes' runtime out of the R600. This is an extreme test, chosen because it provides a consistent measure of battery capacity across different machines, and in real-life usage we'd expect to get at least double that amount.

Battery Life Results

Battery life in minutes
Longer bars are better

But two hours and 40 minutes isn't exactly stunning. It's no more than many a netbook - less that quite a few of them, too.