Toshiba Portege R700-S1330

 

Toshiba's new Portégé R700 surprised me with its mature styling, serious muscle, and ridiculously light heft. Despite being a true ultraportable, this machine is quite powerful--Toshiba somehow even fit an optical drive on it! But a few unpleasant surprises make the whopping $1599 price tag less appealing.

The 13.3- inch laptop accommodates three USB plugs (one a USB/eSATA combo), headphone/microphone jacks, an HDMI plug, a VGA plug, an ethernet port, a memory stick port, an optical drive, a 128GB solid-state drive, a Core i7 620M running at 2.67GHz, and 4GB of RAM--all tucked into a 12.44-by-8.94-by-0.66-inch frame weighing 3.2 pounds (the rear of the unit fattens out to a width of just over 1 inch). That's power to spare for most on-the-go users, as reflected in an excellent WorldBench 6 score of 128. Factor in a battery life of almost 6 hours, and you have the makings of a pretty awesome ultraportable laptop.
The screen is a reasonably good LED-backlit matte LCD, filling out a resolution of 1366 by 768 easily enough. Colors were good, but the R700 struggles to fill large black areas in video.

The Intel HD integrated graphics solution is more than adequate for playing modest video; it even playing through the HDMI port without difficulty. Horizontal viewing angles are excellent, but vertical viewing angles most certainly aren't. The audio can't fill a room, the speakers get a bit shrill at high volume, and there's no bass to speak of--so rely on the headphone jack instead.

The laptop's black plastic interior complements its black metal lid. The "Toshiba" emblazoned on the lid itself, an
d the two hinges provide silver accents. Almost everything feels very sturdy, and the keys have remarkably little flex. The display lid, however, is a bit too thin and flexible.