Toshiba Portege Z835-P330

Editors' note: After this review was published, Best Buy decided to offer the specific retail-exclusive configuration reviewed here for $799, which is $100 less than the original price.

Another Ultrabook contender enters the fray with the arrival of the Toshiba Portege Z835. Following in the footsteps of the Acer S3, Lenovo U300s, and Asus Zenbook, this system aims to provide Windows users with a clear alternative to Apple's popular MacBook Air.

Unlike some of the other Ultrabooks we've seen, the Z835 wisely comes in under $1,000. Our configuration runs $899, and includes a full 128GB SSD (the similarly priced Acer S3 had a 20GB SSD coupled with a traditional platter drive), but cuts a pretty serious corner by dropping the CPU to an Intel Core i3. Most of the other Ultrabook-style laptops we've seen have Core i5 or even Core i7 CPUs. For everyday use it won't make too much of a difference, but our benchmark tests show a definite advantage to having a Core i5.

While it's not as artfully rendered as the MacBook Air, the Z835 is incredibly light, and offers extras, such as USB 3.0 and HDMI, missing from Apple's laptop. Even the battery life was excellent, beating Lenovo's U300s for the best Windows-based Ultrabook battery score to date. However, the keyboard is surprisingly small and hard to use, with an especially finicky space bar--it might not be a deal breaker, but you'll want to get a little hands-on time to test it out before you commit.

While we've been rightfully skeptical about the entire Ultrabook concept from day one, the actual hardware we've seen and reviewed has all been pretty good. Thus far, the R835 takes the cake, at least on paper, for the right mix of price and features, but the cheap-feeling keyboard stops it from being a clear winner in the category.

Toshiba's laptops tend to be a bit on the thick side. Our recent favorite, the Portege R835 (a sister system to this one) fared better, being reasonably svelte for a 13-inch laptop with an optical drive, but still not exactly thin. The new Z835, however, is an entirely different animal, and is very thin and very light--it's even lighter than the other recent Ultrabooks (not that a few ounces makes a huge difference at this level).

The look is very similar to that of the popular R835, with a brushed metal lid and slight taper toward the front. The R835 felt a bit insubstantial, which was forgivable, as it was such a good overall bargain. The Z835 has a similar feel, and the shiny sliver plastic hinges look cheap, as do the similar plastic touch pad buttons, while the lid has a tremendous amount of flex when pressed. The system still has an overall upscale look, but if the Z835 plans to compete with not just the MacBook Air, but also high-end Ultrabooks from Asus and Lenovo, it's not going to win with those shopping primarily on aesthetics.

The keyboard does nothing to ameliorate the cheap feel, it's the laptop's single most frustrating feature. The letter keys are shaved down on the top and bottom, ending up more rectangular than square, and with a smaller surface area. The space bar is amazingly tiny, and frequently failed to register, although that may be a function of my particular typing style--you may have better luck. All of the keys are also especially shallow, which adds to the awkward feel. On the positive side, the keyboard is backlit, so it's not all bad news.

Taking a different approach than the other Ultrabooks, which all mimic Apple's buttonless click-pad design, the Portege Z835 has a more traditional touch pad with a smaller surface area and separate left and right mouse buttons. It's largely a matter of taste, as the bigger click pads on the Acer, Asus, and Lenovo Ultrabooks have been average at best (especially compared with Apple's industry leading touch pad). The smaller pad on this system was pleasingly responsive, and the biggest problem we had was that the mouse buttons were made of cheap, shiny plastic. We did appreciate, however, that the touch pad has a handy on-off button right above it, in case you have a mouse plugged in and don't want to accidentally hit the touch pad surface.

The display on the Z835 has the same 1,366x768-pixel native resolution as the vast majority of 11-inch to 15-inch laptops. That's fine, especially for a sub-$1,000 laptop, but some of the other thin 13-inch models offer more--the Asus Zenbook for example has a 1,600x900-pixel screen. The Toshiba screen was clear and bright, but colors didn't look as vibrant as the much more expensive MacBook Air. Its glossy surface picked up some glare from nearby lights, but horizontal off-axis viewing was good. The screen bezels were small on the left and right sides, although there's a lot of blank space above and below the display. The speakers, which fire from the front edge, got loud without distorting, but like nearly all speakers in laptops of this size, they lacked bottom end.

The Toshiba Portege Z835 has a decent selection of ports and connections, including USB 3.0 and an Ethernet jack, the latter of which is missing from some of the other Ultrabooks. There's no Bluetooth on this model, nor an optical drive, so make sure you won't need either of those.

This version, the Z835-P330, is a retail model sold at Best Buy. In order to hit that appealing $899 price, a few corners had to be cut, such as the aforementioned Bluetooth, or the slower Intel Core i3 processor. Toshiba plans to make more expensive versions of the Z800 series available via its Web site, so you'll be able to pay more upgraded components, such as a Core i5 CPU, if you want.

In this particular case, the 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M in our review unit is certainly powerful enough for everyday computing, such as Web surfing, e-mail, basic office productivity, and even streaming HD video. However, it doesn't come close to matching the performance of the other Ultrabooks we've tested, all of which had faster Core i5/Core i7 processors.

This system brought up the rear of the pack in each of our benchmark tests, and if you plan on keeping a lot of high-end programs open at once, editing video, or doing other intensive tasks, it may be worth trading up to a faster CPU, either in a different configuration of the Z835 or in one of the other Ultrabooks. That said, in anecdotal use, we found this system to be fast and responsive, and it both booted quickly and resumed from a sleep state quickly.

Juice box
Toshiba Portege Z835	Average watts per hour
Off (60 percent)	0.41
Sleep (10 percent)	0.91
Idle (25 percent)	5.33
Load (5 percent)	20.63
Raw kWh	23.66
Annual energy cost	$2.69

The Toshiba Portege Z835 chalks up a win in the battery life column, running for 5 hours and 16 minutes on our video playback battery drain test. That's a few minutes faster than the Lenovo U330s Ultrabook, and about 30 minutes longer than the Asus Zenbook. The MacBook Air still beats all of the above, however, with an additional 90 minutes of run time on top of that.

Toshiba includes an industry-standard one-year parts-and-labor warranty with the system. Support is accessible through a 24-7 toll-free phone line, and a customized support search page can direct you to online documents and driver downloads for this specific model. Because this specific configuration is a retail exclusive version, you can expect heavy sales pressure from the store to add an extended warranty. We generally do not recommend these--if you feel like you want additional protection, you should purchase it directly from Toshiba.

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System configurations
Toshiba Portege Z835-P330
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated)/1696MB (Total) Intel GMA HD; 640GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Asus UX31E-DH52 (Zenbook)
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-2557M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB(Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 128GB Solid State Drive

Lenovo IdeaPad U300s
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-2677M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Shared) Intel HD 3000; 256GB JMicron 616 Solid State Drive

Acer Aspire S3-951-6646
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-2467M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 128MB (Shared) Intel HD 3000; 320GB Hitachi 5,400rpm + 20GB Solid State Drive

Apple Macbook Air 13.3-inch - Summer 2011
OS X 10.7 Lion; 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-2557M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 384MB (Shared) Intel HD 3000; 128GB Apple Solid State Drive

Dell XPS 14z
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-2640M; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 520M / 1GB(Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 750GB Western Digital 7,200rpm

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