Toshiba is showing off a new convertible tablet-style notebook at CES this week called the Toshia Portege M930. Or rather, Microosft is showing it off — which explains why I didn’t spot it at the Toshiba booth.
Fortunately the folks from Engadget, The Verge, and Notebook Italia all found this convertible and posted some hands-on details.
The laptop has a 13.3 inch display, an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid state disk. But what really makes it special is the unusual way it transforms from laptop to tablet mode.
Basically you push the top of the screen back 180 degrees until it’s facing the opposite direction and then fold it down over the keyboard as if you were closing the laptop lid — except now the screen will be facing up.
The mechanism seems to be a bit sturdier than some slider-style devices we’ve seen in the past, so hopefully it would be able to stand up to repeated openings and closings.
Weighing in at just over 4 pounds, the Portege M930 is a bit on the heavy side by today’s ultrabook/ultraportable/tablet standards, but it’s certainly not the heaviest laptop we’ve ever seen.
Too big for touch control.
I for one am loving these types of prototypes. A full-blown desktop OS that can run all of my current desktop apps, has all the usual ports and a full-size physical keyboard and a nifty little tablet device all rolled into one portable package, sounds pretty sweet to me! Execution will be everything on these devices, but I’m confident that some really nice ones will be coming along soon. I see devices like the iPad and my $99 touchpad, soon to be running cyanogenmod 9, looking like the toys that they are and like quite the waste of money rather soon. Here’s to hoping that the future of computing doesn’t revolve around a mobile OS that hampers true productivity.