We see a lot of notebooks at PC Authority, but like the BenQ JoyBook 8000 (page 37), the Portege 2010 was an immediate crowd pleaser when it was removed from it's shipping materials, garnering lots of "oohs" and "aahs" from techies and non-techies alike.
Evoking similarities to the Sharp PC-AR10 (reviewed March 2001, page 72) which we described at the time as ‘an appealing piece of artisanship', the Toshiba Portege 2010 is one of the slimmest and most stylish notebooks we've ever seen at PC Authority.
Measuring a ridiculous 1.9cm at its thickest point (it measures 1.5cm everywhere else), the Portege 2010 should be fragile but it isn't. It's surprisingly rigid when opened, with only a mild give in the screen when we twisted it by the corners.
The display hinges are solid, and we were confident when holding it by one corner and letting the chassis support its entire weight. This brings up another good point: the Portege 2010 only weighs 1.2kg, which, with its shape and size, means you can easily slip it into a bag or folder and carry it around comfortably.
The unit comes with a Type II PCMCIA slot, an SD slot, two USB 2.0 ports and internal modem and 10/100 Ethernet port. There's absolutely no room in the chassis for an optical drive, but Toshiba sells external floppy and DVD-ROM drives with a similar silver finish to match.
Unfortunately the Portege 2010 we looked at did not come with an external CD drive, so we were unable to benchmark it.
The small size and weight mean that there are compromises to be made in the componentry, however they are trade-offs that many people would be happy with.
Internally, the Portege 2010 runs an 866MHz Pentium III-M with speed-stepping, 256MB of SDRAM and a 40GB hard disk. While the processor may not be top-notch compared to today's Pentium 4-M behemoths, the RAM and hard drive capacity are not to be sneezed at and all-up it keeps the power drain on the battery down.
The standard configuration offers around two hours of battery life, but using a well-designed snap-on second battery can, according to Toshiba, extend this to around six and a half hours.