Toshiba has always had its own unique style when it comes to notebook designs, and its latest model (shown on the Intel booth at Computex in Taiwan), the Portégé M135, is one of the blingest notebooks we’ve ever seen that hasn’t been coated in crystals. 

The entire wrist rest has a diamond-cut pattern in its silver surface and is almost as good at reflecting light as a real gem. Well, maybe not quite, but it does give it a very flashy look. And Toshiba has decided to opt for a bright red screen bezel, although we’re not quite sure why, as the lid on the model on display is actually black. 

The M135 has a chicklet type keyboard which feels very well made, certainly up to Toshiba’s typically high standards. But it is the innards of the M135 that makes it really special, as it’s one of only a couple of notebooks so far to feature Intel’s ultra low Voltage Core i5-U520 processor.

This is comparably slow to its full fat brethren, at a mere 1.07GHz (whereas the standard mobile Core i5 processors starts somewhere around 2.2GHz), but the trade-off in performance is made up by the vastly improved battery life.

Ultra low power processors draw about half the power of the full speed versions. This also allows for thinner and lighter notebooks. In addition, the processor features Intel’s Turbo Boost technology which allows it to dynamically increase its performance on demand. 

As this is a very thin and light notebook, it doesn’t feature a DVD drive. Toshiba has at least made sure there’s an eSATA port in case you want to copy data to and from the M135 a little bit faster than USB 2.0 can manage.

The eSATA port also doubles up as a USB 2.0 port and there are an additional two USB 2.0 sockets on the opposite side. There’s also an HDMI output so you can connect the M135 to a projector or your HD TV. 

We expect an official announcement from Toshiba shortly, as we don’t know when the Portégé M135 will be available, or how much it’ll cost at present.