Toshiba to enter netbook sandbox
Everybody and his brother is making netbooks these days but one big company that has stayed away is Toshiba. The market is quite large with interest so high though which is why HP, Dell and Lenovo are in the netbook game today. A reader who must remain anonymous has informed us that Toshiba is showing a netbook to the university supply crowd. The Toshiba netbook has an 8.9-inch screen (1024×600), Atom 1.6 GHz processor, 4-cell battery, Windows XP and a SSD or HDD option. It sounds like a few other netbooks, doesn’t it? Of course Toshiba could capitalize on its branding as we’ve suggested that big guys can do. Interesting side note, Toshiba is not forth-coming on the naming of the secret netbook but it was in a case with "Libretto" on it.
Could be the rebirth of the Libretto U100/U105? I have the U105 which I use while traveling. Really small, keyboard is cramped, but if light weight is the primary concern, it works.
I remember back in the day the VHS-tape-sized libretto’s with their 486 processors…what a long way we’ve come! I could see why Toshiba would shy away from calling this a true Libretto since they used to be so expensive and that hasn’t been the goal of netbooks. I wouldn’t mind seeing their take on the netbook idea, though.
I had a Libretto 50C, it had a 75mz Pentium I proccessor and 32 meg of ram. I even managed to add a WIFI card before shoving it into a closet. I compared it to my new EEE PC 900 and it’s still smaller and lighter than the typical Netbook. Until I did a lot tweaks and replaced the SSD drive it didn’t seem a whole slower than the netbooks either.