If you're shopping for an ultrabook, you've got to at least consider Toshiba. Four months after its introduction, the company's Portege Z830/835 remains the lightest in its class at 2.5 pounds (versus 2.9 to 3.3 pounds for most rivals), with the best collection of ports?including Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, and a memory-card reader?that some ultrabooks leave out or delegate to dongles, as does the Dell XPS 13 ($999.99 direct, 4 stars).
We've tested two versions of the Toshiba already, the thrifty but sluggish Intel Core i3-powered Portege Z835-P330 ($799.99 list, 3.5 stars) and the fast but pricey Core i7-based model Z830-S8302 ($1,429 list, 3.5 stars). Now we're looking at the middle or Core i5 model, the Toshiba Portege Z835-P370 ($1,049.99 list)?and at the risk of sounding Goldilocksian, it's our favorite of the three.
Design
The super-skinny (0.6 by 12.4 by 8.9 inches, HWD) Z835-P370 gets its light weight from a magnesium alloy chassis that makes its base surprisingly sturdy?unlike its vanishingly thin screen, which flirts with the F word (flimsy) if you grasp its corners and wiggle them. In its favor, however, our test unit's screen hinge didn't get the shakes during typing as our Toshiba Z830-S8302's did.
The 13.3-inch display has the same mediocre 1,366 by 768 resolution as every ultrabook we've seen, excepting the 1,600-by-900-pixel Asus Zenbook UX31-RSL8 ($1,049 list, 4 stars) and HP Envy 14 Spectre ($1,399.99 direct, 4 stars). It's nicely bright, with sharp text and colors despite narrowish viewing angles; between the screen and the LED-backlit keyboard, we had no trouble working through a long evening in a less-than-brightly-lit room.
Besides the backlight (which by default turns off after 15 seconds of inactivity, though you can switch it permanently on or off), the keyboard offers an admirable layout, with dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys instead of doubling up these functions on the cursor arrows. We didn't test Toshiba's claim of its spill resistance, but we soon grew accustomed to its firm, somewhat shallow typing feel. Speaking of dedicated, the Toshiba's touchpad has two chrome mouse buttons instead of the mere clicky corners in fashion nowadays; their slightly stiff operation is a contrast to the pad's smooth gliding and tapping.
Features
The Z835-P370 does not have the Intel Smart Connect technology that the HP Envy 14 Spectre and Dell XPS 13 can tap into to update Microsoft Outlook and other Internet applications while the system sleeps (though one of its USB 2.0 ports can charge handheld devices while the system sleeps). But it has other wireless capabilities including Wi-Fi, WiDi or Wireless Display, and Bluetooth.
While the Toshiba ultrabook has no optical drive, we've already mentioned its impressive array of ports. Microphone and headphone jacks and an SD card slot are found on the left side of the chassis, with a USB 3.0 port on the right. Two USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port for modern monitors, and a VGA port for older displays or projectors are at the rear.
The Portege's 128GB solid-state drive has 77GB of free space out of the box, the rest occupied by everything from a system recovery partition to a measly 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security to Google Chrome and a slew of Toshiba-brand utilities. As expected, the SSD makes the little laptop a lot perkier than a hard-drive-based system, booting in 26 seconds and resuming from sleep in 3 seconds by our stopwatch.
Performance
The Z835-P370's one-year warranty doesn't stand out from its competitors. Nor does its Intel Core i5-2467M processor, the same 1.6GHz dual-core, four-thread chip found in a handful of popular ultrabooks including the Dell XPS 13 and our Editors' Choice HP Folio 13 ($1,048.99 direct, 4 stars). Its 6GB of standard RAM tops the 4GB usually found in the $1,000-street-price segment, but didn't bring the performance boost we hoped to see in our benchmark tests.
The Z835-P370's PCMark 7 score of 3,122 was within the margin of error of the HP Folio 13's 3,146, a step behind the Dell's 3,535. It posted solid times in our Handbrake and Photoshop CS5 multimedia tests (2 minutes 30 seconds and 5 minutes 18 seconds, respectively). As with other ultrabooks, its Intel HD Graphics 3000 integrated graphics put the kibosh on any idea of serious gaming, falling short of 19 frames per second in both Lost Planet 2 and Crysis.
With a rundown time of 7 hours 21 minutes, the Z835-P370's 47Wh battery nearly tied those of the HP Folio 13 (7:33) and the Core i3 Portege Z835-P330 (7:35) and bested that of the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Thunderbolt) ($1,299 direct, 4 stars) (5:46). The larger 58Wh battery of the HP Envy 14 Spectre, however, remains our ultrabook champion at 8 hours 4 minutes.
Its more comfortable keyboard and elegant design touches narrowly keep the HP Folio 13 as our category Editors' Choice, but we're impressed by the Toshiba Portege Z835-P370. With the same light weight and high connectivity plus the best price/performance ratio of Toshiba's ultrabook trio, it'll never be a briefcase burden.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:
COMPARISON TABLE:
Compare the Toshiba Portege Z835-P370 with several other laptops side by side.
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