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Toshiba Libretto 50CT

PC MagBy Dominic Bucknall
Date: 24/07/97
First Looks: Systems
Toshiba's Libretto 50CT is the smallest Windows 95-compatible notebook on the market. Apart from the lack of a CD-ROM option, it offers most of the functionality you'd expect from a conventional portable.
THE TOSHIBA LIBRETTO 50CT, possibly the world's smallest fully featured PC, can be viewed as the result of taking the design of the new Portégé 300CT to its logical limit. Take away most of the ports and put them on a replicator, dispense with a CD-ROM drive, make the floppy disk drive external only, and reduce what's left to the minimum possible size, and you have the Libretto.

Such a description perhaps underplays the impression created by a notebook that's the size of a video cassette and weighs only 850g, yet still packs in a 75MHz Pentium processor, 16Mb of EDO RAM (expandable to 32Mb) and a 750Mb hard disk. You'll be impressed when you see a Libretto.

The core system has an infrared serial interface, but largely relies on its port replicator for connection to the outside world--the infrared port runs at the old 115Kbps IrDA 1.0 speed, rather than 4Mbps IrDA 1.1. The replicator adds a 9-pin serial port, a parallel port and a VGA port, but there's no external keyboard port and no USB port. The floppy disk drive connects via a PC Card interface using the Libretto's single Type II card slot, so you don't have to take the replicator with you if you plan on using the disk drive.

Remarkably, the Libretto 50CT has a full-colour TFT screen. Although the LCD display has only a 6.1in. diagonal, it delivers a crisp, readable 640-by-480 image with colour depths up to 24-bit. The 1Mb Chips & Technologies 65550 graphics chipset can drive an external monitor at up to 1,024-by-768 resolution in 256 colours at the new VESA standard 85Hz vertical refresh rate.

The keyboard is just about big enough for typing, with keys about half the standard size. The pressure-sensitive stud that controls the pointer is on the right-hand side of the screen surround, where it provides adequate cursor control--unless you happen to be left handed.

DC power comes from a Li-ion battery that lasted for 1 hour and 43 minutes of continuous use, so you should get well over two hours with power management enabled.

At £1,495 (ex. VAT), Toshiba's Libretto 50CT costs nearly three times as much as a typical Windows CE system. However, it's a unique system that should find a niche among those who need full Windows 95 compatibility plus real portability.-by Dominic Bucknall

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Toshiba
Phone: (01932) 828828
Fax: (01932) 845605
Price (ex. VAT): £1,495

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