Toshiba Portege R830 Laptop

[Kickapoo]

Nothing much has been mentioned about this laptop. So lets see what does this laptop has to offer for all of us. What competition will it offer for the new kind of laptops like MacBook Pros and HP's AMD-powered Pavilion dm1. As such it is said that this new laptop is a good mixture of price, design, features, and performance. So does it matches all the requirements lets have a look.

The new Portege R830 design is almost identical to its older brother Portege R700, some of the negative points of the Portege R700 was that it did not have a good processor that almost all its competitors had a good support for it. Now that requirement is fulfilled by the new Portege R830. Plus it has got some more new features in it, which we will keep discovering as this review progresses. So first lets start with the design of the laptop.

Design
As I have said above the design of the laptop is very much similar to the previous model Portege R700 and I must say that they almost look as twins. The subtle dark blue tint to its brushed-metal magnesium alloy chassis is a repeated design, the body of the laptop is a bit sturdy though it appears to be light in weight. If we have a look at the screen of the laptop then it does appears to be very light and we could have expected some work on that, shifting our attention to the keyboards, keyboards are pretty well maintained with vertical row of dedicated page-up, page-down, home, and end keys all placed on the right side of laptop. Now what this causes is that it shifts the enter button and also the right shift key further right side making it very difficult to locate that. Even the media and the volume control buttons are a bit difficult to locate. In spite of the flaws then also the Toshiba Portege R830 does manage to get a good keyboard experience as well as the touchpad experience. One more thing if I am missing out is the backlight keyboard, it should have been present I feel so.

Now lets see what are the features of this laptop

Features
It does come with a couple of interesting software utilities that will keep you interested in. One of them is the ReelTime. It will display all the recent documents and Web pages in the thumbnail form at the bottom of the screen, if you want to combine photos and notes in a single workspace then Bulletin Board does that task. If you are new to the Toshiba computers then you will definitely take some time to get used to it but that’s ok. It is an interesting feature that you will not regret learning it.

It has a 13.3-inch LED display that will give you a resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels that is far much better then it s competitors. So here Toshiba scores well. Though we checked out the off-axis viewing angles of the laptop but sad to say that we were not so impressed with that. We also had a check with the audio quality of the laptop but the sound was ok.

It comes with one USB 2.0 port, one USB 3.0, USB 2.0/eSATA and also a slot for the sd card reader. Wifi and the Ethernet support is there in the laptop, in the optical drive it will come with the DVD Burner.

Performance
Now lets see how well does it perform in different factors, so lets have a look at its performance.

The Toshiba Portege R830 comes in two options one is with the core i5 processor while the other one comes with the core i3 processor. Whats the difference between two is that the core i3 model will come with Bluetooth, WiMax, and Intel's Wireless Display, for beaming video signals. While all these things will not be present in the one having core i5 processor. Now if we consider the core i5 processor in the Toshiba Portege R830, then it does lags behind apple mac book pro which as the same processor but the difference is little, if we talk about the multitasking speed and also the image processing it definitely races ahead of all the laptops and if you consider the difference, i must say that the difference is highly noticeable. We have not taken in to consideration the core i3 processor and hence I will not mention about that.

If you ask me Toshiba Portege R830 does gives you exceptional performance and races ahead of many laptops like Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T, Samsung 9 Series 13.3-inch, Asus U31JG-A1. So that's what the difference it scores a full marks in the performance wise.

[Kickapoo]

Battery
Even the battery life is the strongest department of the Toshiba Portege R830. On conducting a battery drain test for the laptop it did come with some good encouraging results beating even the 13.3-inch Apple MacBook Pro. It ran for almost 7 hours and 1 minutes which is almost as double as the R700 had. All thanks to the efficient new processor that it has got it really makes good usage of the battery and hence that's why its going to be a good name in the market if the manufacturer’s publicize it very intelligently. Many of the laptop manufacturers claim that their laptop has a good battery but all the tests are conducted in the unrealistic environment and hence it would be bad to say about it.

Conclusion
Toshiba laptops comes with a good 24*7 support and offers you many help online as well. So it’s a much added feature. If we look at the over all features though some marks has been reduced due to some negligence in the design as well as the screen of the laptop but that’s ok. It scores really very well in the performance department and also the battery life. So all that does makes it a must buy laptop. So overall rating from my side for this laptop would be 4.2/5.