Toshiba is celebrating its 20 years of leadership in designing and manufacturing notebook computers at this year’s GITEX technology exhibition in Riyadh, showing off the newest models in its notebook range for the first time in the Middle East.
To commemorate this 20th Anniversary, the company has launched two new models that set the standard for the industry. The ultra-portable Portége R200, the thinnest wireless-enabled notebook in the world (and weighing only 1.3kg), will be on the Toshiba stand for the first time in the Middle East, hosted by its business partner in the Kingdom, Arabian Business Machines. In addition the ultra-compact Libretto sub-notebook, which has been reintroduced to the world due to popular demand, is expected to be released in the region soon.
GITEX Saudi Arabia is also the first time that the whole range of Toshiba machines featuring its new EasyGuard reliability and usability technology will be shown, namely the Portége M300, the Tecra A4, Tecra M3, Tecra A3 and Tecra S2.
Toshiba has sold 37 million notebooks in the twenty years since they were first introduced. Toshiba was the company that sparked off the mobile computing revolution when it introduced the T1100 in 1985. Until then, a “portable” often weighed twenty to forty pounds (ten to twenty kilograms). Toshiba realised that for people to be able to make their computing environment part of their daily work-life, they’d have to be revolutionise the design through massive miniaturisation and innovation. When it arrived, the T1100 was a show-stopper. It weighed only 9 pounds (4 kilograms), had two floppy drives, 256 kilobytes of memory and a 4.77MHz Intel 286 processor.
Since then Toshiba has been an innovation leader. Toshiba was the first with colour displays in 1992, and more recently was the first notebook manufacturer to put WiFi (wireless networking) into a laptop, and the first to offer a DVD burner.
