Toshiba Satellite U205, Portege R400, Satellite P105, Satellite A135

While the U205 isn't a new system for Toshiba, the Vista pre-loaded edition (available starting 2/7/07) is. At 4.1 lbs, the U205 fits in the ultra-portable class and we're positioning it a poor-man's Portege since it's the only non-Portege ultra-portable from Toshiba (maker of the Portege as well).

The system comes preloaded with the 32-bit Home Premium edition of Windows Vista and is available with a choice of Intel's Core 2 Duo processors: the T5500 and the T7200. The 7200 is faster (2.0Ghz vs. 1.66Ghz) and has more L2 cache (4MB vs. 2MB) but both have the same front-side bus speed (667 Mhz). The base $1299 configuration comes iwth a gig of DDR2 SDRAM. Both configurations come with a 160GB hard drive. The optical drive is Toshiba's SuperMulti that supports 11 different formats.

As you'll see from the next images, this is sort of a plain Jane of a notebook squeezed into a small package, from a very reputable notebook maker.

For David Berlind's write-up on the U205 see his post in ZDNet's TestBed blog.