We’ve never been shy about our love for Toshiba’s lightweight magnesium laptops, so we’re ecstatic to see that the Portege R830 is nearly here, bringing Intel’s second-generation Core i3 and Core i5 processors to the 3.2 pound, 13.3-inch form factor. We spotted the R830 and siblings at MWC last month, but today you can lay down the cash, with nine Benjamins buying you the cheaper Core i3 variant, as well as two weeks to gleefully anticipate your newfound mobility before the notebook ships to your door. Alternatively, you could wait and drop an extra $30 for a 2.3GHz Core i5-2410M that can turbo up to 2.9GHz under load, but otherwise the units are identical inside and out — you’ll find a 1366 x 768 LED-backlit screen, 4GB of DDR3 memory, 640GB of storage, a DVD burner and integrated Intel graphics no matter which numbered door you open.

The panacea of glasses-free 3D displays (or content) might not yet be upon us, but Toshiba’s doing its best by putting the two models in its Regza GL1 family up for sale in Japan. Tomorrow marks the debut of the smaller 12GL1, spanning a 12-inch diagonal and offering the unconventional resolution of 466 x 350. That’s expected to be priced at ¥120,000 ($1,431), exactly half of the ¥240,000 ($2,863) asking price of the 20GL1, which will follow it swiftly with retail availability on December 25th. The latter display has the decency to come equipped with a more civilized 720p resolution and 550:1 contrast ratio, although, as you can see above, neither panel can be accused of being unnecessarily thin or space-efficient. Still, this parallax barrier stuff is the best we’ve got for the moment — and as usual the best we’ve got resides in Japan only.

Update: The Wall Street Journal reports that Toshiba is planning larger members of this glasses-free 3D family with a panel of over 40 inches in the cards for the company’s next fiscal year, which begins in April 2011. More to come at CES in January.

When’s the last time you said “Crank up the netbook, I love this song!” Yeah, probably never, but if you had a Toshiba mini NB520 you might — or at least that’s what Toshiba would like to envision you would do. It packs stereo Harman Kardon speakers that can crack the foundation and wake the dead with an amazing two watts each, apparently the smallest tweeters H/K has ever put on a laptop. That’s paired with an Atom N550 processor, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 250GB HDD, 10 hours of battery life, and a 10.1-inch 1024 x 600 LED-backlit display. If that’s too loud or you’re too old, there’s also the “no frills” NB500, offering the same specs but minus the petite sound system and stepping down to an Atom N455, though doing so at a lower price. What price? That we don’t know, but we’ll find out when both ship in the first quarter of 2011, which starts in a month. Yikes.

At this point Toshiba’s dualscreen Libretto W105 shouldn’t need much of an introduction — or at least after glancing at the picture above we figure it won’t. It looks like a laptop straight out of the future. And it kind of is. It’s the sort of clamshell gadget we’ve seen rendered and rendered for years, but that’s never made it to market… until now that is. In celebration of Toshiba’s 25 years in the laptop business, the company’s gotten bolder than ever, and it hasn’t just created a gadget with two seven-inch capacitive touchscreens, but it’s actually brought it to market. Sure, it’s only available for a very limited run, and at a lofty $1,100, only die-hard gadget geeks are bound to fork over the cash. That said, it’s still one of the most intriguing devices we’ve seen all year, and that’s saying something. And it’s even more compelling when you consider that packs the parts of a 12- or 13-inch ultraportable, including an Intel Pentium processor, 2GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD and also runs Windows 7. But that’s exactly what’s wrong with the Libretto — it looks like the future, but it’s held back by modern day laptop parts and software. We’ve spent quite some time with the W105 — we typed half of this review on the bottom screen! — so you’ll want to hit the break to find out just what we’re talking about.

Hey, there little guy! That’s the Toshiba AC100 — an Android 2.1 smartbook with Toshiba’s custom user interface — on show in the UK, where you can now grab one up. The 10.1-inch, 1.9-pounder has yet to show its face anywhere near the US, but as for specs it’s got a 1GHz Tegra 250 SoC, a 32GB SSD, 512MB of DDR2 memory, 802.11n WiFi, optional 3G, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and an HDMI port. While it’s listed on Amazon you still can’t actually order one of these bad boys stateside, but if you’re in the UK, you can grab one up for £292.52 (almost $450) for the non-3G model. Video of the little guy in action back in June is below.

Stuck on the Toshiba Portege R705′s magnesium alloy palmrest is a shiny sticker celebrating the company’s 25 years of “laptop innovation.” Now, we’re the first to hate on the plethora of decals that festoon Windows laptops these days — and this one also deserves to be peeled off and tossed into the garbage — but the sticker actually happens to speaks volumes about why the $800 R705 is such a big deal. We promise to keep the history lesson short, but for years the Portege series has been Toshiba’s top-of-the-line ultraportable brand, featuring the latest CPUs while usually setting the standard for portability, and always been attached to seriously hefty price tags. Take the Portege R500, which was the worlds lightest laptop in 2007, and cost two grand.

The Portege R705, which is exclusive to Best Buy for now, changes that formula. And in celebration of the big two-five, Toshiba’s put out a 3.2-pound, Core i3-powered stunner that’s less than half the price of past Porteges. Oh, and did we mention it has an on-board optical drive, 500GB of storage, Intel’s wireless display technology and promises 8.5 hours of battery life? We won’t beat around the bush — it’s impressive. But did Toshiba maintain the same Portege standards when creating the R705, or did it cut quality along with the dollar signs? That’s been our main question, and we’ll answer it and others after the break in our full review.

The Toshiba Libretto W100 made a guest appearance on the Engadget Show last week, and since we got to spend a bit more time with the dualscreen laptop we thought it was only right to release some more impressions into the ether. We also got confirmation from Toshiba that the somewhat-of-a-concept-PC will be hitting retail channels in August, including Amazon, and will cost $1,100. It may be one of the only dualscreen tablets on the market, but no matter how you break it down that price seems a little outrageous. But you wouldn’t make up your mind before reading some further impressions and watching a close up video of the screens working in tandem, would you? Well then, we’ll see you after the break.

Ah industry firsts, a chance to grab the spotlight before the world grabs hold of your coattails. Toshiba’s Dynabook TX/98MBL claims to be the industry’s first laptop to play back 3D content in Blu-ray format when it ships at the end of July in Japan. The 15.6-inch laptop with LED backlit 120Hz panel (60Hz to each eye when viewed through active shutter glasses) pushing 1,366 x 768 pixels utilizes WinDVD BD to playback the Blu-ray 3D format with some help from NVIDIA’s 3D Vision software and GeForce GTS 350M hardware with 1GB of dedicate video RAM. Inside you’ll find a Core i7-740QM processor, 640GB of hard disk, up to 4GB of memory, a Blu-ray disc drive of course, and harman/kardon stereo speakers with Dolby Advanced Audio to help make the most out of 3D gaming. Price is not listed but it’s expected to list for about ¥250,000 (about $2,700). What, you do want 3D on your 15-inch laptops don’t you?

Update: Toshiba wants you to know that it’ll be called the Toshiba Satellite A665 in Europe, presumably because “TX/98MBL” can only be pronounced by the Japanese.

News continues to trickle out about Toshiba’s upcoming tablets, which we learned just last week would come in both Windows and Android flavors and would be shipping before the year is through. Now it seems that both versions, despite offering different designs, will offer NVIDIA Tegra 2 internals. That both tablets will be manufactured by Compal makes us wonder if we weren’t given a preview of the future Tosh model when playing with a 7-inch Android prototype at CES in January, pictured above. There’s a video of that after the break to refresh your memory, a relic dating from the pre-G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra era. Simpler times, those.