When you try to think of what might be the smallest laptop ever, you might think of the Macbook mini or the Macbook Air… but you are not even close.
The Libretto 110CT UMPC may just be the smallest laptop in the world when it comes to actual consumer models.
There are a few smaller laptops than the Libretto, but those are generally pet projects for true geeks, and they’re rarely much to boast about when it comes to function.
The Libretto 110CT UMPC has a 256 color LCD display, 64 megs of RAM, four gigs of HD space (not a lot, but for the size, it’s pretty impressive). It has 2 pcimia card slots, USB support, and it comes with Windows 98 (fully operational Windows, not a mobile version).
So yeah, it’s an older machine, but it’s actually a fully functional laptop, barely larger than a pocket book. It lasts about eight hours on one charge, and while it was sold in 1997 for about $4500, you can get one today for around $350.
It’s mostly useful as a travel laptop, say you travel a lot and just want the smallest laptop available, or as a novelty piece for a techie’s collection.
The unit was part of Toshiba’s late 1990’s “Libretto” series, which aimed to create the smallest line of laptops in the world.
Toshiba has since released the Libretto U100 in 2005, which is definitely impressively slim and small, at just under three pounds, but still a bit larger than the 110CT UMPC.
Of course, these days, Libretto seems to be more focused on act ually creating powerful, and slim, laptops, and not just super tiny laptops.
Really, it’s not the most useful laptop in the world, but it’s an interesting piece of history. Remember, that in 1997, laptops were about the size of pizza box, and were anything BUT portable, so the Libretto series was pretty revolutionary for its time. Today, it’s at least an interesting story.
If you want to get your hands on one, we probably don’t even need to tell you they stopped making them a long time ago. However, if you want to hit up eBay or some used computer site, there should be one available somewhere on the internet. Just don’t expect it to play Gears of War 2 or anything, and you should do just fine.
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Great article. If this came out in 1997, why in the world did it take another 10 years for big computer companies to expand on the idea like with the current netbooks. Sure, $4500 was a crazy price, but I’m sure if they developed the idea further, we would have had netbooks much sooner than just 2 years ago.