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Toshiba does Acer $100 better, offering the Z835, a Best Buy exclusive, for $800. Its low price is matched by its light weight. At two pounds, 6.6 ounces, it beats all the others here by a good half-pound. But the Z835 also looks and feels the cheapest of the bunch. Its construction seems less solid—particularly the lid, which has a disconcerting amount of flex.
The Z835’s dark-gray and black color scheme is peppered with chrome accents that look a bit dated. All the keys on the Z835’s island keyboard are normal width, but they are also slightly squat, which takes getting used to, as does the shallow travel of all keyboards of this ilk. The keyboard’s backlighting is a surprising feature at this price—and not one currently found on the more expensive Ultrabook models. A traditional touchpad of decent size with discrete right and left buttons stands out among the other Ultrabooks’ clickpads.
The Z835’s hardware specs are another reflection of its low price. The centerpiece is a 1.4GHz Core i3-2367M, which doesn’t benefit from any Turbo boost whatsoever. This renders the Z835 the slowest in the benchmarks of all four Ultrabooks, and even slower than our elderly zero-point, except in Quake 4, thanks to Sandy Bridge graphics.
Only the Portégé Z835 offers a backlit keyboard—a standard feature of the MacBook Air.
The Z835 also skimps on storage capacity, offering just 128GB. It’s full-SSD, but that’s not saying much. The Toshiba NAND flash coupled with a Toshiba controller mustered just 187MB/s sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark—half the speed and then some of the other two SSDs in this roundup. More pathetic still, the Z835’s sequential write speed of 49.23 is 40 percent slower than that of the HDD in Acer’s S3.
On the brighter side, the Z835 offers the most generous array of ports, with full-size VGA in addition to full-size HDMI, two USB 2.0 ports plus one USB 3.0, and an Ethernet port—a rarity in this roundup.
The Z835’s glossy 1366x768 screen isn’t spectacular, but it reproduced pictures and videos without noticeable flaws and the viewing angle is thankfully wider than that of the Acer S3. In our battery rundown test, the Z835 played a continuously looping video for close to five hours. It took about three hours to completely recharge. It booted to Windows in 24 seconds, which isn’t bad.
Even more so than Acer’s S3, the Z835 deserves credit for offering such a svelte and exceedingly portable form factor for its price. But reaching that price entailed compromises—a few too many, in our opinion, to grant this product more than a mild endorsement.
$800, www.toshiba.com
Very slim and lightweight for the price; lots of ports.
Too underpowered; sorry SSD speeds; flimsy lid.
| CPU | 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M |
| RAM | 4GB DDR3/1333 |
| Chipset | Intel HM65 |
| Display | 13.3-inch, 1366x768 |
| Storage | Toshiba 128GB SSD |
| Connectivity | 1 USB 3.0, 2 USB 2.0, Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, headphone/mic, media reader, webcam, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi |
| Lap/Carry | 2 lbs, 6.6 oz / 3 lbs, 1.2 oz |
| Zero Point | Toshiba Portégé Z835 | |
|---|---|---|
| Premiere Pro CS3 (sec) | 1,260 | 1,620 (-22.2%) |
| Photoshop CS3 (sec) | 183.6 | 220.5 (-16.7%) |
| Proshow Producer (sec) | 1,533 | 2,075 (-26.1%) |
| MainConcept (sec) | 2,530 | 3,660 (-30.9%) |
| Quake III (fps) | 191.7 | 159.3 (-16.9%) |
| Quake 4 (fps) | 17 | 38.4 (125.9%) |
| Battery Life (min) | 240 | 297 (23.8%) |
Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Comments are closed on this article
aarcane
February 07, 2012 at 4:10pm
Every power user's lineup, which one should have consisted of an Android Phone, a Netbook, a Laptop, and at least one Desktop should now be reduced to a Desktop, an Ultrabook, and an Android Tablet. So long as the phone can perform USB and Wifi tethering, it's no longer essential (only desirable) that it be an Android device.
bautrey
February 07, 2012 at 10:22am
For the lenovo laptop, on lenovo's website it states that it is $1200. Now for that price, I think thats a steal compared to what your getting.
hackmaster
February 06, 2012 at 9:18pm
these days, people are mostly paying for looks, which is kind of disappointing. Size is not the only thing that should be considered. The best gaming rigs are like aircraft carrier size- as in not build for travel.
thetechchild
February 06, 2012 at 8:47pm
Rather unfortunate that ultrabooks are still practically embryonic. Just look at smartphones, which are soon to boast 2 GHz quad cores, 1080p screen/camera resolutions, and touch screens to boot...
Hopefully, within the next 2-3 years, Intel will more seriously invest in its R&D (honestly, Sandy Bridge E was hardly a jump from Sandy Bridge, even though they could *easily* have pushed a much faster CPU for the same price), and we'll start getting cost-effective quad cores, and, perhaps more importantly, integrated GPUs. I won't knock on the power of discrete GPUs, but if we're looking at entry-level ultrabooks just under a grand, then a lot of the price heavily relies on Intel, and secondarily, the screen.
Waiting for something like the Asus UX31E, but a beefier proc and better screen, and a little more *under* a grand as opposed to just over it.
0ly1r3m@1ns
February 08, 2012 at 6:45pm
sandy bridge e was more just to make an enthusiast line up the real stuff will come with ivy bridge
US_Ranger
February 06, 2012 at 3:59pm
Hopefully you can do this same article with the AMD notebooks when Trinity comes out.
Cregan89
February 06, 2012 at 3:58pm
Put a Dell Inspiron Duo style 1920x1080 IPS display on the ASUS Zenbook for anything less then $1400 and I'll buy it yesterday.
