A new wave of lightweight notebooks promises to be more livable for the road warrior, by offering more advanced features and built-in optical drives.
Among them are new entries from Lenovo and Toshiba, each of which announced on May 31 a new business-oriented notebook line built around a 12.1-inch wide screen and an internal optical drive. The new machines each weigh about 4 pounds.
Smaller is usually thought of as better, when it comes to business notebooks. Lightweight machines are easier to tote to meetings and on planes.
But the more diminutive machines—often called ultraportables—have generally forced compromises, including asking buyers to use cramped keyboards and to carry peripherals such as CD-RW drives separately, in addition to selling for higher prices than somewhat larger notebooks.