Toshiba Portege R835-P88

In a world where ultrabooks are hip and happening, ultraportables can seem like yesterday's news. The Toshiba Portege R835-P88 ($849.99 list) is the latest version of a model that's been around for years. It weighs a third of a pound more than the average ultrabook. It has an old-fashioned optical drive instead of a newfangled backlit keyboard. It also costs less than virtually all ultrabooks and runs faster than any of them?and yeah, an optical drive can still come in pretty handy sometimes. For portability, performance, and value (especially at street prices markedly below its $850 list), the Portege R835-P88 is what we said its R835-P50X predecessor was 11 months ago: the epitome of what an ultraportable should be, and an easy successor to last year's model as an Editors' Choice in the category.

Design
The R835-P88 weighs 3.2 pounds on PC Labs' scale?more than the 2.9 pounds of the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Thunderbolt) ($1,299 direct, 4 stars) and numerous ultrabooks, though actually an ounce less than our Editors' Choice ultrabook HP Folio 13 ($1,048.99 direct, 4 stars). Its magnesium alloy chassis is a handsome dark blue, accented by chrome (plastic) screen hinges.

The screen feels solid, less flexible or flimsy than that of Toshiba's 2.5-pound ultrabook models such as the Portege Z830-S8302. It's a glossy 13.3-inch panel with the usual 1,366 by 768 resolution; vertical viewing angles are narrow enough that you'll find yourself adjusting its tilt, but horizontal angles are sufficiently broad and brightness and color are fine.

The keyboard, as mentioned, isn't backlit but offers a first-class layout, with dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys plus Ctrl and Delete in their proper lower left and top right corners, respectively. Its typing feel is snappy and sure, if a little shallow. The touchpad works smoothly, its twin buttons giving just the right amount of tactile feedback.

Features
On the right side of the R835-P88's chassis, next to the DVD?RW drive, are headphone and microphone jacks, a USB 3.0 port, and an Ethernet port. On the left are VGA and HDMI ports and two USB 2.0 ports, one an eSATA combo port with Toshiba's "sleep and charge" functionality for recharging handheld devices without turning the laptop on.

Bluetooth and WiMax are absent, but the R835-P88's 802.11n Wi-Fi worked fine in our tests and Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) is on hand for users who want to zap audio and video to an HDTV set equipped with a Belkin or Netgear adapter. Toshiba preloads the system's spacious 640GB (550GB free out of the box), 5,400-rpm hard drive with a slew of house-brand utilities and a scanty 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security.

The diminutive speakers above the keyboard pump out pleasant enough audio, but were occasionally drowned out during our tests by the Toshiba's cooling fan?inaudible during routine productivity work, the latter grew noticeably loud during strenuous exercises such as our graphics benchmarks.

Performance
While most Intel Core i5 ultrabooks we've seen use a low-voltage (17-watt) processor running at 1.6GHz, the R835-P88 ultraportable boasts a standard-voltage (35-watt) Core i5-2450M chip running at 2.5GHz. Teamed with 6GB of RAM, it delivers performance that not only bests those flyweights, but even edges Core i7 ultrabooks like the Toshiba Z830-S8302 (1 minute 59 seconds in our Handbrake video encoding test, versus 1:46 for the R835-P88) and Lenovo IdeaPad U300s (4:25 in our Photoshop CS5 image editing test, versus 3:55 for the R835-P88).

The R835-P88's PCMark 7 score of 2,313 is only middling, because it has a hard drive instead of one of the SSDs that PCMark 7 adores. But its other benchmark numbers are thoroughly competitive with other ultraportables such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X220 and Panasonic Toughbook CF-S10, leading the field in Handbrake and tying the Lenovo X220 in Photoshop. The only reality check came in our gaming tests, where its Intel HD Graphics 3000 integrated graphics predictably fell short of playable frame rates?plus or minus 21 frames per second in Crysis and Lost Planet 2.

The R835-P88's 66Wh battery will get you through a whole day's work: Though shy of the 9 hours 26 minutes of its predecessor, the R835-P50X (not to mention the 11 hours of the big-batteried Acer TravelMate 8481T-6440), it lasted a solid 8:40?longer than any ultrabook we've tested?in our MobileMark 2007 rundown test.

We've made it clear in other reviews that we're fans of ultrabooks, but the Toshiba Portege R835-P88 is an eye-opener: Almost light enough to forget it's in your briefcase, it delivers ultrabook-beating performance plus the convenience (even if you only use it occasionally) of an onboard optical drive plus the appeal (even if it's mostly due to a hard disk instead of SSD) of a bargain price. At the very least, it's worth keeping our ultraportable category on the books so we can give it an Editors' Choice.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE:
Compare the Toshiba Portege R835-P88 with several other laptops side by side.

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