The Portege goes the Ultrabook route. How
does it hold up?
As Ultrabooks now start rolling down the
proverbial wave, we're once again faced with the inevitable quandary of having to
see More of the Same Thing. It's especially tricky when it comes to Ultrabooks,
because it's harder to skew away from Ultrabook design conventions when it's
the conventions that make the Ultrabooks. That said, the question that arises
today is "Would the Toshiba Portege Z830 Ultrabook" make the cut?
Let's shoot for the answer.
The Z830 Ultrabook is among the slimmest
that we've seen, but holds the grand honour of being the lightest that we've
held - at 1.12kg, it's comparably lighter than its competitors. It's a sleek,
stylish thing, as typical of Ultrabooks, with a neat grey-silver finish.
The Z830 tries its hands on a little
originality by placing most of its ports at the back of the device, which helps
achieves its slimness. While the USB3.0 port and the card reader takes the back
corner of the side, the VGA, HDMI, Ethernet and two USB2.0 ports take the rear.
Most everything else works pretty well. The
screen displays crisply and brightly, the speakers are decent and the smooth
trackpad comes with a finger scanner. The screen hinges, however, we find to be
a little too loose, which makes the screen wobble when moved. The keyboard
could definitely be better implemented, as the keys are clicky and have short
travel, aside from feeling rather uncomfortable to use.
Toshiba's Ultrabook didn't gun for a wholly
different specs spectrum. Under the slim housing is an Intel Core i5-2467M
clocked at 1.60GHz, 6GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The resulting performance is
very good overall, and it's well capable enough of running most computing work,
HD content and less graphics-intense games. The SSD setup gave it a
satisfactory 25 seconds of start-up time, and it can boot-up from sleep in
under 3 seconds.
The Z830 also manages to provide solid
battery life. In our movie-loop test with Wi-Fi on and brightness set to
maximum, the Ultrabook still manages to clock a fraction under 6 hours.
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Toshiba Portege Z830
Info pc.toshiba-asia.com
Specifications
CPU: Intel Core i5-2467M @ 1.60GHz
RAM: 6GB
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
Display: 13.3-inch WXGA HD LED Backlight TFT display (1,366x768)
Storage: 128GB SSD
Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 2 x
USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet
Extras: Webcam, Card Reader
Weight: 1.12kg
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