The ultraportable Toshiba Portege R30-A1302 boasts of an Intel Core i7 processor alongside a high-speed solid-state drive (SSD). What makes it even better? It comes with a battery life that lasts all day long. This makes it perfect to qualify as a powerful business laptop. Not much can be said about the remainder of the system that is pretty average and nothing beyond the ordinary.
Design review
The Portege R30-A1302 has sort of an old school design and looks a bit chunkier when compared to other ultrabooks that come in much sleeker designs. It’s a just over one inch thick at 12.4 by 1.04 by 9 inches (WHD). However, it is quite a light machine weighing just about 3.18 pounds.
The frame of the Toshiba has large side panels that provide room for full-size ports – VGA, Ethernet, ExpressCard and have enough room left. There is provision for a DVD burner and also an SD card slot, three USB ports and a headset jack.
You can enjoy the multi-touch touchpad experience along with a pointing stick when using this device. Below the keyboard, you will also find the mouse buttons as how they are usually placed. The keyboard claims to be spill-resistant and has a slight sponge-like feel to touch.
Machine performance
The device comes with a dual-core Intel Core i7-4600M processor and integrated Intel HD 4600 graphics. The memory is a good 8GB. It takes a matter of seconds to boot the system. The system’s SSD is the reason it scored 4,727 points on PCMark 7. AS far as performance at the multimedia front is concerned, Portege beat its rivals-the Dell e7440 and the two Lenovos.
The ultraportable cleared the battery rundown test with flying colors lasting a good 9 hours 20 minutes which was much more than the Lenovo T440s and Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch. However, when compared to the MacBook Pro which has a battery life of about 11 hours and 26 minutes, it still lagged behind by a few hours.
The device is appealing with respect to its features and model design. It gives the user a lot of relevant features such as the DVD burner, ExpressCard etc in a very simple easy-to-use design framework. But it falls short in its appeal when it comes to the $1,600 price which is almost the same as that of ultrabooks which come with a touchscreen of much higher-resolution. Computer rentals are a great option if you would like to check out this new machine by Toshiba!