SDA India is an online resource for Software, Development,IT, Architecture, Open Source, Mobile, Security, Databases, Delphi, C, OS, Asp, .Net, Php, Xml, Java

Toshiba Corp. launched an ultraportable laptop that it claims is the world's lightest, putting it in competition with vendors like Apple and Lenovo.

Weighing just 2.4 pounds and maintaining its earlier thickness of just 0.77 inches, Toshiba claims the R500-S5007V to be the lightest ultraportable laptop in the world. But the company is facing competition from similar products, such as the Apple MacBook Air and Lenovo ThinkPad X300 notebooks. The MacBook Air took over the world's thinnest award, with measurements of 0.76-in. thickness and 12.8-in. width, and weighs just 3.0 pounds. The competing ThinkPad X300 measures 12.5 x 9.1 x 0.73 inches, and weighs in a bit heavier at 3.4 pounds.

Dubbed as the Portege R500-S5007V, its configuration includes 12-inch LED-lit and transflective display, which can shut down the LED backlighting by reflecting the sun's rays to illuminate the screen, according to Toshiba. A 1.33GHz ultra-low voltage Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM give it just enough performance to run Windows Vista Business while netting about eight hours of battery life. Bluetooth, a fingerprint reader, and 802.11n Wi-Fi are also standard on the system, as are Ethernet and other features sometimes dropped from ultraportables.

The company also claimed that the new laptop was the first to include a 128G-byte solid-state drive (SSD) to replace the hard drive. Laptops to date have had 64G bytes of storage, though both Lenovo and Apple provide 128G bytes of storage through two 64G-byte modules.

Unlike traditional HDDs, SSDs do not have any moving parts, which help reduce power consumption and increase battery runtime. In addition to their use in PCs and notebooks, SSDs are expected to eventually be used in MP3 players and other portable flash-based devices.

The Portege R500-S5007V with the solid-state drive is the standard configuration, however Toshiba offers similar configurations with a hard drive option, a company representative said.

Expected to start shipping by the third quarter, the ultraportable laptop will carry a price tag of USD 2,999.