Keyboard and trackpad
If you have already bought Portege Z835 and
been disappointed with the typing experience, the appearance of Kirabook is
nothing good for you. But at least you can know that Toshiba has listened to
your complaints. After many customer (and reviewer) criticized the keyboard for
being too cramped, Toshiba managed itself to improve layout, with the deeper
movement and a sophisticated fringing at the top of each key. And it’s
effective: the keyboard of Kirabook is indeed interesting to type. We can type
email with fast speed, which create almost no spelling mistake. If you allow us
to reset your expectation a little bit, “the deeper movement” is a relative
phrase – the buttons here are pretty flat, though they provide much
responsiveness than the previous Ultrabooks of Toshiba. Besides, on such thin
laptop, any keyboard bounce is something surprisingly welcome.
As you expect from a laptop this size, Kirabook
comes with a keyboard back-illumination, which you can turn off by pressing Fn-Z.
if you look around, you can see some other functions dipped on the main
keyboard, such as 1 and 2 buttons, which you can use to zoom in and out the Start
menu. There’s also a magnifier on the left of the spacebar (long bar), but we
strongly recommend that you ignore it, if you can: the objects on the screen
may look pretty ugly when you start magnifying them.
After
many customer (and reviewer) criticized the keyboard for being too cramped,
Toshiba managed itself to improve layout, with the deeper movement and a
sophisticated fringing at the top of each key.
Trackpad Synaptics of Kirabook is wide and
high, leaving you lots of space for2-finger scroll, pinch-to-zoom and all
gestures specialized for Windows 8. Like other laptops we’ve seen, it actually
deal with these more complicated gesture pretty well, but it struggles with
1-finger tracking. Especially, you can see that the pointer doesn’t move when
you drag your finger all over the trackpad. Even when the pointer moves, it not
always get to where you want it to go, or it stops for a short while on the
screen before coming to its destination.
Luckily, as we implies, touchpad feels no
headstrong when you doing stuff such as scrolling with 2 fingers. Pinch-to-zoom
is also pretty smooth, though we see that it has done better in some of these
apps than other apps. For example, sometimes we can’t pinch it with the thumb
and the fore finger, just the forefinger and the middle finger. However, pad realizes
the thumb.
Luckily,
as we implies, touchpad feels no headstrong when you doing stuff such as
scrolling with 2 fingers.
Screen and sound
With 13.3 inch, 2,560x1,440 screen, Kirabook
is the first ever Windows laptop with the screen that is sharp enough to
challenge Retina MacBook Pro and Chromebook Pixel. It’s a huge opportunity for Toshiba
and indeed, it largely has prominent watching experience. The films look
amazing, colors are vibrant and the 220ppi screen is as sharp as you expected,
which means that you will see no sign of pixelation at natural res.
With
13.3 inch, 2,560x1,440 screen, Kirabook is the first ever Windows laptop with
the screen that is sharp enough to challenge Retina MacBook Pro and Chromebook
Pixel.
Anyhow, it depends on the content: many of
your favorite desktop apps won’t look nice at that resolution, a problem of
which we have detected with the original Retina screen MacBook. Everything just
doesn’t have the right scale, so you may have the tiny buttons, the small
search fields or the unsuitable scaled web to fill the entire screen. And when
the objects fill the screen, sometimes they look blurred and stretched out. Accidentally,
Toshiba has included 1 app that helps to toggle between the text settings and
other screens, but you have to sign out from Windows anytime you want to
switch, which is very tiring.
If any, we wish the viewing angle were
easier to watch. Toshiba says that Kirabook has some kind of wide-viewing-angle
tech inside it, but that’s not IPS. Whatever it is, it doesn’t do well in
maintaining colors and contrast at unusual angle. At direct look, the screen is
splendid and easy to watch from many different viewing angles. But even though
you push the screen forward a little bit, the colors start to be distorted. At
any angle, the glossy surface usually reflects lots of light. In short, we
won’t consider this a big problem, but you can think that we’re disappointed:
we hope that the first Windows laptop having such res will offer perfect screen
quality.
At
direct look, the screen is splendid and easy to watch from many different
viewing angles.
On the inside, Kirabook has built-in DTS
Studio Sound tech. within the extent we can tell, the main benefits is the loud
volume – enough for you not to involve in the easily distorted high-end range
if you don’t want to. And you won’t want to. Even with the volume at 50/100, we
can easily enjoy many of the Kanye West songs, though it depends on how good
your hearing is, you can certainly hear at the level of 25/100 in a quiet
space.
