Toshiba\’s Portégé line has always been the head of the company\’s shelf-with prices to check. The Portégé R705 upends that lineage: It\’s capable, sure, however it\’s also affordable. So does it live up to its fancy double-accent-marks?

Spoiler alert: yes. It\’s not that the Portégé R705 is the fastest laptop obtainable. Or the prettiest. Nevertheless it\’s in a class by itself among ultraportable notebooks, packing more performance into a lighter frame than anyone else has up to now, at a completely competitive price. Is there room for improvement? Obviously. But there\’s rather more here to like than not.

Price and Configuration

The system we tested-the sole configuration available on this Best Buy exclusive-comes loaded with a 2.26GHz Core i3-350M processor and Intel integrated graphics, 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 500GB (5400rpm) hard disk drive, and an optical drive for $800. If you need color options, you\’ve come to the incorrect place. But hey, isn\’t nearly black the recent black anyway?

Design

The the first thing you spot concerning the new Portégé is the burden. Or rather, the dearth thereof. It\’s incongruous, really; this full performance, 13.3-inch notebook weighs just a splash more than a netbook. In reality, at 3.2lbs it weighs about 25-percent lower than my 13-inch MacBook Pro. Switching between the two seems like moving from a discus to a Frisbee.

Your first assumption is that the R705 have to be somehow diminished or cheap: A wimpy ULV processor, say. Flimsy materials. Nope. As the gaudy sticker on the palm rest boasts, there\’s an entire Core i3 Intel inside, and the body is constructed of strong magnesium. There\’s even, so help me, a DVD drive. What the what?

The weight-saving voodoo comes from Toshiba\’s Airflow Cooling Technology, a new heat-fighting scheme co-developed with Intel that uses directed streams of air to cool components. It\’s what lets Portégé R705 walk like a ULV notebook but talk like the college rig it really is.

The only sacrifices that keep the R705 from letterman status are aesthetic. The Portégé isn\’t ugly, it\’s just bland. It\’s blocky and nondescript. The quilt is midnight blue but looks black much of the time; the corners are softened but still angular. Chrome screen hinges are the closest thing here to flair, unless you count the four stickers crammed beneath the keyboard. They seem like someone slapped tuner stickers on a bone-stock Civic.

Thankfully, you\’ll spend quite often covering those up along with your sweaty wrists. The display\’s where you\’ll be spending most of a while, and the Portégé\’s 13.3-inch 1366×768 screen is crisp, clear, and bright-albeit somewhat glossy. It\’s really very nice, especially when the brightness is cranked up, however it could be nice not to determine quite a lot of my reflection. The speakers, too, are decent to some extent; over a undeniable volume the tinniness overwhelms the sound, but the quality\’s just fine on your average Hulu binge.

But that\’s the joys stuff-what about whenever you ought to bang out emails for your new Nigerian mineral heir friend? The Portégé sports an island-style keyboard, whereon each chiclet island feels an ocean faraway from its neighbor. The small spaces afforded each letter don\’t amount to a huge deal, although the enormous-fingered among us may have a difficult time typing accvbur1ytly. But where the keyboard can be annoying for some, the trackpad is genuinely crappy. It claims to chat multitouch but really isn\’t anywhere on the brink of fluent. Sure, it pinch-to-zooms, but two-fingered scrolling only worked in fits and starts. Or stops, rather. It\’s unreliable to the point of abandonment.

Reliable but less essential is the R705\’s WiDi capability, which allows you to wirelessly connect your desktop on your TV. It works perfectly well here, but understand that WiDi doesn\’t play DVDs under DRM or support 1080p, and you\’ll ought to purchase $100 add-on from Netgear to take advantage of it. It\’s good, not great, and it\’s not something that are meant to factor heavily into your overall decision.

The same thing would be said concerning the R705\’s overall look: it\’s nice enough, but the bread and butter\’s under the hood.

Performance

This is where the Portégé really shines. It\’s not that it\’s essentially the mostsome of the most powerful laptop available-that\’s a fight we\’ll leave to the gamers-but it surely\’s got incredible pep for its size and weight. Whenever you wouldn\’t necessarily trust the Core i3–350M processor (and, more specifically, Intel\’s gimped integrated graphics) to do any heavy gaming, the Portégé can stream HD videos without much difficulty and is more than capable of handling our email/internet/productivity needs.

Benchmarks? Sure! The Portégé stacks up nicely against its contemporaries and mops the floor with Core2Duo and ULV machines. Here\’s how it performed in GeekBench against the Acer Aspire TimelineX, its primary competitor-though a pound heavier-that also packs Core i3:
It\’s not a massive gap, however\’s definitive. Moreover, the R705\’s overall mark of 4145 more than double\’s the ThinkPad Edge\’s previous generation SU7300 ULV guts.

The Portégé also publish a 4959 in PCMark Vantage, slightly in advance of the TimelineX and miles beyond any Core2Duo ULV performance. Though the integrated graphics could stymie some of your high definition video efforts, and if you wouldn\’t want this to be your go-to gaming rig, it\’s more than capable of keeping up with everyday needs.

So the R705 is a smart daily driver. Unfortunately, it runs out of gas in a whole lot not up to a day.

Battery Life

While not as impressive as the listed 8 hours, I was actually ready to squeeze pretty decent stamina from the R705. I tested higher performance settings, medium screen brightness, bluetooth off (because there is none), and a page automatically reloading every 30 seconds on Firefox to simulate active web browsing.

Total Run Time: 4 hours, 58 minutes

And which may obviously be further improved by settling for lower performance/higher battery life settings.

All Inside the Balance

The R705 isn\’t the flashiest notebook available, and it\’s not probably the most powerful, and it\’s not the lightest. But it surely\’s got incredible pop for its weight, and there\’s something refreshing concerning the minimal form.

Do I actually have reservations? Sure. The desktop is refreshingly free of bloatware, but the system gets bogged down with Best Buy\’s software installer. The cooling system may keep the chassis light, but the rig also gets pretty hot. There\’s no bluetooth. And the trackpad and integrated graphics really are under ideal.

But those are nits that I\’m picking, each no heavier, relatively, than the R705 itself. And together, they still don\’t prevent this new Portégé from being a once in a blue moon everyday laptop.

Source

This post is tagged: Portg, R, review, toshiba, ultra, ultraportable