Toshiba adds more models with Next G capabilities, but if you want to slot in a 3 SIM you're out of luck unfortunately.
Wireless notebooks are wonderful things, but once you step outside your home or office wireless cloud, you're rather stuck unless you remembered to bring your wireless adaptor with you. Even then, if you're on certain provider plans, you could be stuck outside regular business areas when it comes to reception.
The answer for that second part for many business customers has been to adopt Telstra's Next-G platform; while nobody sane could declare it "cheap", its coverage is comprehensive and most speed tests rate it well ahead of the competition. That still leaves you with a wireless adaptor or dongle sticking out of your laptop, however.
Toshiba has today announced three new laptops that take the Next-G ball and run with it, offering integrated Next-G capabilities that strip the need for an external adaptor or antennae.
Toshiba already offered the Portégé R400 with 3G capabilities, and it's adding the Portégé R500 ($3300 ex GST), Portégé M700 Tablet ($3800 ex GST) and Tecra M9 ($2250 ex GST) to its offerings from today.
The first two are arguably the actually mobile notebooks, while the M9 is an interesting beast to throw portable wireless Internet into. With a carrying weight "from" 2.47kgs (which usually means in PR-speak that it's 2.47kg with every part stripped out, and much more if you actually want, say, a battery in it) it's not exactly a portable unit.
We were curious to see if you could buy any of the units and slap, say, a 3 Wireless SIM in there -- 3's coverage is pretty woeful, but its data is insanely cheap compared to Telstra -- but Toshiba representatives shot that idea down, letting us know that the internal 3G workings of the laptops are locked exclusively to Next G.
Even with that locking, you wouldn't be able to tempt a store into giving you any of the new machines on Telstra's recently announced $0 laptop plan, as that has a top price barrier of $700, nowhere near the pricing for these newer laptops.