Gadget review: Toshiba's entry into Ultrabook domain

Toshiba's existing Portege line-up already boasts light and fully powered laptops. The Portege Z830 is its entry into the Ultrabook segment.

While a thin and light form factor is characteristic of Ultrabooks, Toshiba seems to have outdone itself with the Z830. Weighing just 1.12 kg, with a width of 0.63 inch, the Z830 is one of the lightest and slimmest laptops, and that's not just in its segment.

However, the design of the Toshiba featuring a matte-grey finish appears dull and simply uninteresting.

Once you get over the design, the Z830 has a lot going for it. It features three USB ports (including one USB 3.0), HDMi connectivity, Gigabit Ethernet, SD card reader, VGA, mic/headphone jacks and a Kensington lock slot. The Portege Z830 makes no compromises in terms of connectivity and is on a par with many regular laptops.

The keyboard on the Z830 is similar to that on the fuller-sized R830 and a few changes have been made to make it fit. It sits closer to the edges of the laptop and little space has been wasted to make a fuller keyboard fit within the smaller frame of the laptop. Better yet, it features backlighting, so you can type away in the dark. The touchpad, too, is similar to its fuller-sized laptops and features two separate buttons, which are more reliable and responsive than the integrated buttons we've been seeing on other Ultrabooks.

The performance of the machine was impressive (for its segment); with a quick boot time and no real hiccups — even at 1080p video on YouTube — the Z830 seems to be capable of doing all your daily tasks.

What you won't be doing on this laptop is any form of intensive gaming or heavy image or video editing. But your web browsing, e-mails and office-document-processing work really well. In fact, due to its SSD, the programs did seem to start up quicker and appear more responsive. Although with a capacity of just 128GB, you will most likely require an external hard drive.

The screen is where the Z830 disappoints. While the resolution of 1,366x768 may seem satisfactory, the display itself was unimpressive, with dull colours and weak visibility at irregular viewing angles. It seems Toshiba could have done more with the screen. Similarly, the speakers on the laptop have a flat sound, but that has been characteristic of the Portege series.

Ultrabooks are expected to be able to provide an all-day computing experience, and the Z830 does, in fact, deliver. You can expect about six hours of real-life usage on a single charge, more if you can lower the brightness or are not doing any CPU-intensive work.

The laptop comes in at about Dh4,500, which is, of course, by no means cheap. But if you're looking for a laptop that you want to be able to lug around all day without any compromises to performance, you can't go wrong with the Toshiba Z830.

            Bhavishya Kanjhan is a digital marketing professional and an early adopter of all things digital. Follow his tweets on @bhavishya