GBM Shortcut: Toshiba Portégé R600 Has a Fantastic Outdoor Display

Toshiba sent over a Portégé R600-s4201 for me to take a look at and I really dig this ultraportable so far. It’s very here in San Francisco, which is a rarity. Most homes here (including mine) don’t have air conditioning so I decided to work outdoors with the R600 for the afternoon.

The reason the Toshiba Portege R600 is great for working outdoors is because it has a transflective display. This means you can turn off the display’s backlight and sunlight actually illuminates the screen.

Usually the sun is my worst enemy when I try to work outdoors. Some PC manufacturers’ anti-glare screens do improve the situation by reducing reflections and increasing screen brightness, but this reduces battery life significantly. Toshiba’s solution does the exact opposite and improves battery life significantly.

GBM Shortcuts are sponsored by Lenovo, makers of IdeaPad and ThinkPad notebooks, netbooks and Tablets.
This is a quick video of what the display looks like outdoors on a sunny day with the backlight turned off. With the backlight turned off the display is unreadable indoors, but very easy to read outdoors.

The R600 is a true featherweight at less than 2.5 lbs. It comes with a 128GB SSD, DVD burner, 3GB of memory and a low-voltage 1.4GHz intel Core 2 Duo processor. The display is the most impressive thing about this device to me, but the $2,499 price tag may be hard to justify.