Toshiba Portégé Z830-104 review

Toshiba isn’t trying to compete directly with Asus and Apple with its Portégé Ultrabook – instead of concentrating solely on styling and hyper-slim dimensions, the company has added a dash of practicality with full-size ports, a matte-finish screen and a backlit keyboard.

The Asus ZenBook UX31, for example, has mini-HDMI and mini-VGA video outputs plus Ethernet via USB, so you need to carry the supplied adaptors to connect to video and wired network devices. The Portégé Z830-104 has full-size ports at the back of the chassis. This makes it one of the chunkier Ultrabooks we’ve seen – though at 16mm at its thickest point it’s still incredibly slim, though not quite as svelte overall as the tapered ZenBook. There are also two USB ports, one USB3 port and 3.5mm audio input and outputs, so the increase in size is well justified. The laptop’s aluminium chassis keeps the weight down to a tiny 1.1kg, so light you’ll barely notice it’s in your bag. As with the MacBook Air we had occasional bouts of panic when we thought we’d left it at the office, only to find it in our bag all along.

The 13.3in screen has a matt finish, which helps reduce glare from sunlight or overhead lighting – and colours look slightly muted as a result. Horizontal and vertical viewing angles aren’t particularly wide, but there’s more than enough screen tilt to find the right angle no matter how you prefer to work. The 1,366×768 resolution is high enough to work on two documents side by side.

Typing on the full-size keyboard was comfortable enough, even though the keys had very little travel – their springy actions meant they bounced back quickly after being pressed, but we were sometimes left wondering if our presses had registered. There’s plenty of space around each key and all the punctuation keys are where you would expect them.

Even with such generous keyboard dimensions, Toshiba has still managed to fit a reasonably-sized touchpad beneath it. The smooth plastic finish creates a minimal amount of friction, so we had no trouble navigating the desktop, but would have preferred the fingerprint reader to have been placed somewhere other than between the two touchpad buttons. The reader’s position means the touchpad buttons are barely wider than your thumb, which can make dragging files and folders a little difficult. If you want to use a separate mouse there’s a button to disable the entire touchpad.

In terms of performance, the Z830 is typical for an Ultrabook. With an ultra-low voltage Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM, it’s certainly got enough power for most tasks. The dual-core i5-2557M normally runs at 1.7GHz but can Turbo Boost up to 2.7GHz when extra power is needed. An overall score of 46 in our benchmarks shows the laptop can handle everyday tasks as well as some more intensive video encoding. The ZenBook is a touch faster, by a 100MHz, but it’s not a noticeable difference day-to-day.

Battery life is equally impressive – the laptop lasted almost seven hours in our light use test – matching the ZenBook. 3D games rely on the processor’s integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics, which, as a jerky 16.4fps in our Dirt 3 benchmark shows, are only powerful enough for older titles.

Like all Ultrabooks, the Z830 relies on an SSD for storage. This not only helped it boot into Windows in a snappy 15 seconds but, thanks to an SSD’s lack of moving parts, the disk should be more resilient to small knocks than a normal hard disk.

At nearly £1,100, the Z830 is currently at the top end of Ultrabook pricing. Its full-size video and Ethernet ports are certainly useful, especially for those on the go, but Asus’s UX31e has a higher screen resolution and a slightly faster processor for £100 less. If you don’t mind carrying around a few port adaptors, Asus’s model is, just, the better buy.