On Tuesday, Toshiba introduced its new Portégé R500-S5007V laptop. As it weighs only 2.38 pounds (1.08 kilos), the company claims it is the lightest laptop (packing a 128-GB solid-state drive and a DVD drive) on the market.

The Portégé, at 0.77 inches, is one of the thinnest laptops out there as well.

According to the company, the laptop’s storage component is currently the highest capacity notebook SSD. As there are no moving parts in the SSD, the risk for it to fail due to mechanical problems is brought to a minimum; hard disk drives’ mechanical delays are also significantly reduced.

The notebook guarantees eight hours of battery life and packs a 1.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 low-voltage processor. The Portégé also features built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.

All this does come at a price however: the new series starts at $2,999.

Earlier this month, Hewlett-Packard (HP) unveiled its new laptop called Voodoo Envy, also plunging in the race against Apple’s MacBook Air. The Voodoo, only 0.70 inches thin and weighing less than 3.4 pounds (1.54 kilos), is to be made available for the price of $2,099.

Apple’s MacBook Air was launched at the beginning of January. The laptop is about 0.76 inches (two centimetres) thick and weighs less than 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilos). It is powered by Intel's 1.6 GHZ Core 2 Duo processor as standard, with an available 1.8GHZ upgrade. It has 2 GB of RAM, battery life of 5 hours and an 80 GB hard drive.