Toshiba NB300, NB305 netbooks: Snow White's a dwarf

Toshiba has announced a pair of almost identical netbooks. They're so similar, in fact, that we had to email Toshiba to find out exactly what the difference is. "It's largely aesthetic," the company confirmed. The NB300 and NB305 are powered by the latest Intel Atom CPU, and offer up to 11 hours of battery life. Also, the white version of the NB305 seems to be called 'Snow White'.

Most netbooks bore the pants off us, but these 10.1-inch models have a few interesting features. For one, they use the high-speed 802.11n Wi-Fi standard rather than the more common, and slower, 802.11g. They have 250GB of hard drive storage instead of 80GB or 160GB, their trackpads support multi-touch gestures and they're 'mobile-broadband-ready'. We're waiting to hear back as to whether this means that they have a 3G radio built in.

Other than that, they're pretty much your standard netbook: they weigh 1.3kg, run Windows XP or the feature-poor Windows 7 Starter, have integrated graphics, sport a 1,024x600-pixel LED-backlit screen and so forth.

The one crucial fact we're missing is how much RAM the systems have. Being netbooks, they probably have just 1GB, but maybe Toshiba will break the mould and shove a pair of gigabytes in there when these models are released later this month.

Oh and the price? Yeah, Toshiba wasn't too specific on that either, which makes it hard to judge whether these machines are worth buying. But they're worth keeping your eye on at the very least.

In the meantime, check out the top 10 mini laptops you can buy today, in our feature of a remarkably similar name.