Toshiba Portege Z835-P330

The Toshiba Portege Z835-P330 is the newest member of the Portege line, and Toshiba's first ultrabook. Available exclusively through Best Buy, with other configurations coming soon through Toshiba, the Portege Z835-P330 is currently the cheapest of the new slim laptop category of ultrabooks, selling for $799.99 (list). Aside from price the Z835-P330 has three other things going for it: A featherweight chassis, an unusually full feature set, and a long-lasting battery that will take you through an entire workday. Whether or not those highlights are enough to make you overlook its middling performance and mediocre graphics capability is up to you.

Design
The Z835-P330 sports a dark grey magnesium alloy chassis, providing a light but sturdy base. The lid is also covered in magnesium, but is layered on top of a flexible?some might say flimsy?plastic bezel. Inside the magnesium chassis, Toshiba has also reinforced the structure with a honeycomb-patterned plastic ribbing. As a result the Z835-P330 manages to feel far more stable than the Acer Aspire S3 ($899.99 direct, 3.5 stars), which also went with a magnesium and plastic approach. Neither, however, can match the look and feel of the solid aluminum chassis on the Editors' Choice Asus Zenbook UX31 ($1,099 direct, 4 stars). While you're carrying the Z835-P330 around, watch out for its corners. The sharp 90-degree corners, reinforced with magnesium, are just sharp enough to hurt if they were to jab somebody. While people may occasionally chop their food with the MacBook Air as a joke, most ultrabooks have rounded corners.

The Z835-P330's solid feel is especially surprising given its size (0.6 by 12.4 by 8.9 inches, HWD) and weight?just 2.4 pounds. That's a half-pound lighter than the 2.9-pound Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Thunderbolt) ($1,299.99 direct, 4 stars), Acer Aspire S3 (2.94 pounds), and far lighter than the Asus Zenbook UX31 (2.86 pounds).

The chiclet-style keyboard is made of plastic, while the palm rest is brushed magnesium, with a plastic deck. The keyboard uses the same island-style keys seen on Acer Aspire S3, but the Z835-P330's keys have a black glossy finish to them, which I didn't care for. The keys themselves are also surrounded with plastic instead of magnesium. As a result, the keyboard flexes quite a bit during regular typing. The keyboard is spill resistant and also has a backlight, which is ideal in low-light situations. The accompanying multitouch trackpad is small but responsive, with a light texture across its surface. The separate right and left mouse buttons are a little too firm for my tastes, but they are also covered in a glossy chrome finish, which shows every fingerprint. It's a puzzling choice for the two most often touched buttons on the unit.

The Z835-P330 sports a 13.3-inch widescreen display, with 1,366-by-768 resolution?the same size and resolution offered on the Acer S3, but lower than the 1,600-by-900 resolution on the Asus UX31. Like the Acer S3, the screen is backlit (400 nits) for visibility in environments with lots of ambient light. Unlike the Acer S3, the Z835-P330 also offers fairly wide viewing angles, providing clear visibility for yourself and anyone else you want to share the screen with. The screen, while extremely thin, also feels fragile. The slender lid warps and bends at the slightest pressure, and the hinge is just loose enough to wobble at any motion.

The built-in speakers feature Waves MaxxAudio, but even with software enhancement they leave something to be desired. The speakers were disappointing, with low overall volume, and a flat sound that thins out as it gets louder. There's also very little low end, meaning you'll want an external speaker system to hear any bass at all.

There's very little room for air flow in this slim chassis, so you may notice the Z835-P330 getting uncomfortably hot. During testing, the Toshiba got very hot?up to 102-degrees Fahrenheit on the keyboard and 110-degrees on the underside (as measured with a Fluke IR thermometer). Granted, our testing process may push the components a bit harder than the average user would, but you still might want to watch out for a possible case of toasted leg syndrome.

Features
The slim profile of an ultrabook is often attained by stripping the feature set down to the bare minimum. Not so on the Z835-P330. Rather it's outfitted with the best selection of ports we've seen on an ultrabook thus far, taking advantage of the extra fraction of an inch on the hinge edge to put a full-size HDMI port and two USB 2.0 ports?one of which is equipped with Toshiba's Sleep'n'Charge technology. In addition to the pair of ports on the back, there's also a faster USB 3.0 port on the right hand side, accompanied by a case-lock slot on the right and SD card slot and jacks for headphones and a microphone on the left. Set above the screen is a 1.3-megapixel webcam.

A Gigabit Ethernet port on the back is a rare find on an ultrabook, since most rely exclusively on 802.11n Wi-Fi. Unexpectedly, the Z835-P330 comes with WiDi 2.0, Intel's wireless streaming solution that allows you to stream HD content to any HDTV through a Netgear Push2TV adapter (a $99 dollar extra). It's an unexpected feature in this form factor and price range, seen only in the much more expensive Lenovo IdeaPad U300s ($1,199, not yet rated).

The Z835-P330 has a 128GB solid-state dive (SSD), which is large enough to accommodate the operating system, a healthy number of programs, and a modest selection of media. But if you're a prolific downloader of music or movies, you'll definitely want to add a speedy USB 3.0 portable hard drive. Because flash memory provides the speed and responsiveness needed for Intel's Rapid Start Technology (one of the defining characteristics of the ultrabook category) SSDs are the rule, rather than the exception. Thus far, the only ultrabook to offer a larger mechanical drive is the Acer S3, which offers 500GB of storage on a spinning drive plus the flash memory needed for Rapid Start. The Z835-P330 leverages its SSD to achieve a cold boot time of 22 seconds, and a 2-second restart.

As a Best Buy configuration, the Z835-P330 comes pre-loaded with the Best Buy PC App, which minimizes the amount of bloatware installed on the hard drive while still providing access to a wide range of programs. Also included on the drive are Google Chrome, Microsoft Office Starter 2010, and a 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security. You'll also get a number of Toshiba-branded programs and utilities, like Toshiba BookPlace, Toshiba BulletinBoard, and Toshiba ReelTime.

Toshiba covers the Z835-P330 with its standard one-year warranty, but Best Buy offers further protection via its extended service plans. Their basic service plan extends the manufacturer's warranty from 1-year to 2-years ($149.99) and additional accident and spill protection can be included for another $120.

Performance
The Z835-P330 is equipped with a low-voltage dual-core Intel Core i3-2367M processor paired with 4GB of RAM. It's a significant step up from the AMD and Intel Atom CPUs found in traditional netbooks, but it's not as powerful as the Core i5s that have appeared in the Macbook Air 13-inch, the Asus UX31, or the Acer S3. This difference is best seen in the results of our PCMark 7 benchmark test, where the Z835-P330 scored 2,496 points, putting it ahead of the Acer S3 (1,899), but behind the Asus UX31 (3,531) and MacBook Air (3,186). The Z835-P330 was also the slowest of the bunch on our Cinebench R11.5 rendering test, where its score of 1.33 points fell just a fraction of a point behind the Samsung Series 9 (1.36), and was seriously outpaced by the Asus UX31 (2.19) and Acer S3 (1.93). It provided mixed results in multimedia tasks, completing Handbrake in 3 minutes 29 seconds. The only slower competitor was the Samsung Series 9 (4:45), while the Acer S3 (2:36), Asus UX31 (2:19), and MacBook Air (2:09) finished in under three minutes. Photoshop was an entirely different story: The Z835-P330 took 8 minutes 17 seconds, lagging behind the slowest competitor, the Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3A) ($1,599 street, 4 stars) (5:53) by more than 2 minutes.

Without a dedicated graphics processor, you won't be using the Z835-P330 for any sort of gaming, except perhaps the latest Facebook flash offerings. The integrated Intel graphics were unable to support 3DMark 06, and stuttered through our gaming tests like a poorly timed slideshow. It ran both games at medium detail settings and 1024-by-768 resolution, but only scored 14 frames per second in Crysis and 16fps in Lost Planet 2.

Toshiba's claimed battery life of up to 8 hours for the Z835-P330 was pretty accurate. In MobileMark 2007, its 47W battery lasted 7 hours 35 minutes . That's a full hour longer than the 6:32 offered by the Asus UX31 (with a 50Wh battery), and an additional 2 hours longer than either the MacBook Air (5:46 with a 50Wh batter) or Acer S3 (5:20 with a 36Wh batter). Unlike other manufacturers, Toshiba hasn't made any claims regarding standby time.

The Toshiba Portege Z835-P330 may not be the best ultrabook on the market, but it does stand out due to its light weight, exceptional feature set, and category-leading battery life. The Editors' Choice Asus Zenbook UX31 still reigns supreme among ultrabooks because of its solid construction, stellar audio, and better performance, but it's $300 more. If you favor portability over performance, the Z835-P330 is a solid choice.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Toshiba Portege Z835-P330 with several other laptops side by side.

More laptop reviews:
??? Toshiba Portege Z835-P330
??? Dell Latitude E6420-ATG
??? Acer Aspire One AO722-0828
??? Acer Aspire AS5750-6667
??? Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4830T-6841
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/EKPtrdmHJHc/0,2817,2396707,00.asp

kelly ripa reno wildfire reno wildfire osu osu reno news syracuse