Toshiba Portege Z830 Ultrabook Review

Good connectivity options

Toshiba also pack in plenty of extra utilities to get you started. Norton Internet Security comes pre-bundled along with a bunch of games from WildTangent. Toshiba also bundle along their own set of utilities like a web cam application, Bulletin Board for the latest updates, a bunch of diagnostic and hard drive utilities, battery manager, face recognition program, etc. The notebook also features their EasyGuard technology which is designed to protect the hard drive from accidental drops and bumps.

Performance
The Portege Z830 is a solid performer, whether it is handling Windows 7 or any applications. Boot up time is also a lot quicker than most of the other Ultrabooks we’ve tested. Compared to the Core i5-2467M CPUs we see on most Ultrabooks, the Core i5-2557M is slightly more powerful that’s clearly visible in our video encoding test.

Good performance

The Portege is also incredibly silent for the most part, except for when there’s high CPU usage and the intake fan is audible but not too audible to be annoying. The notebook also runs cool which is quite commendable given the slim profile of the Z830. The backlit keyboard keeps you going even under low lighting conditions but the keys themselves aren’t particularly great. Toshiba has ensured that the screen has ample brightness so you can easily use it outdoors. The speakers are placed on the outside and are surprisingly loud.

Superb build and finish

Battery Life
With our handy Battery Eater Pro application, we clocked around 2hrs before the notebook shutdown. This translates to about 4-5hrs of normal usage time, which again is not too bad considering the size of the notebook.

Verdict
Holding the ‘world’s lightest’ Ultrabook title does come at a price. The Z830 will set you back a whopping Rs.96,290, which makes it expensive. More so, because you can easily get an Ultrabook at this price with a Core i7 CPU and a larger SSD, but, you will have to sacrifice on some of the features like full connectivity options and the weight. It’s a tough choice and ultimately, you have to decide if you can live with trading in performance for a slim design and full connectivity options. The Z830 is a brilliant little Ultrabook from Toshiba and is what we all expect an Ultrabook to deliver, all the connectivity options of a notebook but the speed and portability of a tablet. A day will come when tablets, similar to the Asus Transformer, running Windows 8 will make Ultrabooks obsolete but until that happens, Toshiba’s Z830 is currently one of the best offerings in the market.