Toshiba Portege 3110CT review

Three of the developments incorporated in Toshiba's latest remix of its PortÚgÚ sub-A4 notebook, the 3110CT, are what you would expect - the machine is smaller, lighter and also more powerful. What came as a pleasant surprise was the price, which is under the £2,000 mark even with VAT added.

The machine really is tiny: the footprint is about B5 in size, and the unit is just 23mm thick, 14mm of which is the body itself. Thin it might be, but the body casing is strong enough to prevent flexing or sag in the palmrest area and the lid surface is made from magnesium alloy, providing excellent rigidity and protection for the screen.

Toshiba's attention to detail is evident in the high quality of the fit and finish. Potential problems like the rather sensitive power stud have been spotted and allowed for - a sliding safety catch prevents accidental on and offs.

On its own, the PortÚgÚ weighs just 1.3kg, but even with the whole caboodle of drives, PSU and port replicator the weight is only 2.5kg.

On this point, Toshiba has earned its gold star by not charging extra for the 24-speed CD-ROM or the port replicator. The latter is a necessity here as the system unit only has USB and infrared serial ports for connecting to the outside world, while the parallel, serial, VGA and PS/2 ports reside on the replicator instead. The CD-ROM drive has a PC Card interface that takes up the PortÚgÚ's single Type II slot, but the modem is internal, which means that you can carry on using it even with the CD-ROM plugged in.

To help make it a permanent office fixture, the replicator has its own DC input for powering the notebook and, better still, an RJ-45 port for connecting to a LAN. A 10/100Mbits/secs Fast Ethernet adaptor is built into the unit, a novel and useful touch.

Crunch time with smaller notebooks often comes when you get to the keyboard, so I was relieved to find that the PortÚgÚ didn't fall down on this essential feature. Although the keyboard is shrunk down to fit the available space, the main pad remains a reasonable size for typing and the layout is such that you get used to it fairly easily.

The screen runs at SVGA on a TFT panel with a 10.4in image diagonal. If you want more workspace area when you're not on the move, the 2.5Mb Trident Cyber graphics chipset will drive an external monitor at 1,024 x 768 in 16-bit colour with a stable 85Hz vertical refresh rate.

A long, narrow, lithium ion battery pack clips onto the back of the case where the ports would usually be, which explains how the engineers managed to make the 3110CT's body so thin. Power management is controlled by Toshiba's own utility, which resides in the Windows Control Panel and takes over completely from the Windows 98 Power Management controls.

The Toshiba power-management utility offers considerable detail over every aspect of power usage, from CPU speed to which ports are active. Inactivity time-outs are even present for all the major components. The PortÚgÚ is fully ACPI compliant, so you don't need to bother with the BIOS at all. The best news of all, is that this system works. The PortÚgÚ 3110CT is graced with an impressive battery life of around 3.5 hours; far more than is usual for a notebook of this size. As subnotebooks are specifically designed for use on the move, this is a major plus.

The days when miniaturisation on this scale inevitably meant kissing goodbye to anything like respectable performance are also rapidly receding. Between them, the 300MHz Pentium II and 64Mb of RAM will keep up with the typical Windows 98/Office combination acceptably enough, which is all that's usually needed from a subnotebook.