Toshiba intros first 13-inch notebook with Santa Rosa

Toshiba today launched its second notebook, the Tecra M8. Officially the first 13.3-inch widescreen notebook from the company, the system is meant to bridge the difference between ultraportables and mid-range notebooks with a 4.5-pound weight. It also serves as one of the company's earliest examples of Santa Rosa-class performance, using Intel's technology to offer a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo on an 800MHz bus, better X3100 integrated video, and 802.11n. Still rare among most other Santa Rosa notebooks is the use of a flash-based Turbo Memory cache to speed load times.

Intended at first for retail shops and other resellers, a single model of the M8 is due to ship at $1,399 with 1GB of memory, a 120GB hard disk, and a 1.3-megapixel webcam integrated into the lid. It should be available shortly with Vista Business preinstalled and will be followed up by direct-order variants in the near future.