Toshiba Portege Z835-P330 Pro Reviews

The Toshiba Portege Z835 is an all-around winner and was a pleasure to review. It has solid build quality, a decent backlit keyboard, a good touchpad, six hours of battery life, and the characteristic light weight (2.4 lbs) and thinness we’ve come to expect from Ultrabooks. Where the Z835 stumbles is performance; the included 128GB SSD is exceptionally slow. The Intel Core i3 processor is bottom of the barrel but should have plenty of oomph for general usage. At $899 the Z835 undercuts existing Ultrabooks by $100 or more and makes for a very attractive choice. It is an ideal on-the-go companion and a tempting alternative to the Apple MacBook Air.

Time could very well prove me wrong on this one. If the ultrabook as a concept appeals to you, the ASUS Zenbook UX21 is probably going to be a better buy. The $999 model may be $100 more than Toshiba's Portege Z835, but it has a much faster CPU, a slightly better screen, better build quality, and a vastly superior SSD. As we're fond of saying here, there are no bad products, only bad prices. Even though comparatively speaking the Z835's $899 price tag isn't unreasonable, in practice I honestly think it would need to go south at least $100-$200 before being worth considering instead of a thicker ultraportable or a netbook. That may not necessarily be Toshiba's fault, but unfortunately Toshiba's stuck with it. The Portege Z835 feels like the best of a bad situation.

The Toshiba Portege Z835-P330 is the lightest, longest lasting ultrabook we've seen yet, and its affordability adds sparkle to a system with moderate performance and limited graphics capability.

Another entry in the MacBook Air clone wars, the Toshiba Portege Z830 offers great bang for the buck in some areas, but also looks and feels a bit cheap.