The new Panasonic Note Light R8 notebook/netbook comes packed with a pretty strong 1.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 CPU, 2GB of RAM (upgradable to 4GB), and a 64GB SSD with lightning fast 220MB/s reading speed. This seems to be creeping more and more into notebook feature sets nowadays.

The Panasonic Lets Note offers a choice of OS: Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 or Windows XP Professional Edition (they’re offering the kind of options with OS we wish more laptop companies offered).

With a $1,750 retail price, it’s pretty far out of typical netbook range, but its also far more powerful than many notebooks in its class. It’ll be released in Japan later this month first, then around the country in July/August or so.