As we tipped two months back, Toshiba has stepped into the netbook ring. But this is no heroic vaulting over the ropes – the company’s NB100, released overnight in Europe, is a carefully-placed ginger step onto the canvas.
While local Toshiba chief Mark Whittard initially told APCmag.com that the goal was to see if Toshiba could produce a ‘premium’ mini-note rather than just another $500 machine, the NB100 appears to bring almost nothing new – or deserving of a ramped-up RRP – to the table.
Most netbook enthusiasts could recite the specs sight unseen, based on the most popular spec of the 9 inch netbook market. The powerplant is Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom N270, with 512MB of RAM in the Linux model (running Ubuntu 8.04 with OpenOffice 2.4) and 1GB in the Windows XP version, and a hard drive up to 120GB. Then there’s a LAN socket, 802.11g Wi-Fi, three USB ports (which can charge connected devices such as an iPod even while the netbook is asleep), a low-res (0.3 megapixel) webcam and memory card reader.…… sorry, did we nod off at the keyboard for a moment there?
