Toshiba Portege R835-P88 Pro Reviews

The Portégé R830 was launched essentially right before the dawn of ultrabooks in mid- to late 2011. The notebook was at the time a light subnotebook with support for standard-voltage Sandy Bridge CPUs for generally faster performance. By today’s standards, however, many of its advantages have now been eclipsed by even first generation ultrabooks in terms of battery life, weight, and overall system performance due to SSDs or hybrid HDD/SSD solutions in the Intel ultrathins. Furthermore, the disadvantages of the notebook as mentioned in our previous R830 review (such as the average screen brightness, noise under load, and short key drop) are just as apparent in the R835 model. For its intended audience, the R835 has fallen a bit short since its launch over a year ago. Business users interested in the thin-and-light Portégé series should opt for an R830 with its Bluetooth, UMTS and docking station support, while general consumers looking for an everyday 13.3-inch subnotebook will be much more satisfied with Toshiba’s own Portégé Z830 or even Asus’ UX31.

When Toshiba released the Portege R700 in 2010, it came out of nowhere. We didn't have ultrabooks on the market, and nobody was expecting a design like that from Toshiba of all companies. The design served them well, and they extended that design language to respectable notebooks like their Tecra R840 and R850 lines. The problem is that while the R700 was a fine effort, it wasn't perfect out of the gate, and it seems like Toshiba's designers may have gotten nervous about messing with success. The result is an R835 with hardware updates under the hood but none of its predecessor's issues resolved. On the contrary, the R835 seems to have suffered in the interim. Fundamentally we have a sound design, but things fall apart in key areas of the experience. The display is the same problem we've belabored time and time again; that's easy enough to fix provided economies of scale pick up and better quality displays become more readily available, and judging from the explosion of the tablet market this is entirely possible. The keyboard is simple enough to revise, too; lose the glossy keycaps, increase the y-height of the keys, and somehow fix the mushy tactile response. These two items are things that most users can adjust to on a regular notebook, but they're fixable at the design phase as well.

The Toshiba Portege R835-P88 shows that an ultraportable can still kick ultrabook butt.

This one-time favorite is still an excellent go-to 13-inch laptop, if you don't need something quite as slim as an ultrabook, and you can get it for the right p