Toshiba Portege R830 (Core i7-2620M 2.7GHz) - It Just Keeps On Going

Expensive All-Rounder

Expensive All-Rounder

The Toshiba Portege R830 is a breed of laptops that is getting increasingly rarer by the day. Manufacturers are slowly getting rid of the optical drive, one way or the other to cut down on size and weight, giving us essentially what we call Ultrabooks. The R830 however, is not an Ultrabook. It doesn’t have many of the attributes that defines an Ultrabook, like a Low-Voltage-Processor, low cost, or even an SSD.

What it does have however, is something which should be seen more often in notebooks these days. And that's long battery life. In fact, quasi-Ultrabooks (only because of its cost) like the Samsung Series 9 don't have the power consumption, or battery-life numbers that are better than the Toshiba Portege R830. Even the superb MacBook Air has a battery life of 238 minutes (on Windows 7 via Boot Camp), which is about 40 minutes less than the Portege R830. As such, no one can touch the R830 in terms of battery life while on Windows.

The only machine that beats it is also the MacBook Air, when the latter is running on OS X Lion, at 345 minutes. Of course if you want to analyze the numbers deeper, it'd lead us into an OS debate, which we shall not get into today. Our point is simply this: the Toshiba Portege R830 has the longest battery life of any Windows machine we’ve come across to date, and its winning margins are pretty high, compared to other machines of similar class, even those without optical drives. The only other Windows notebook that manages to come close, is the HP Elitebook 2560p, at 256 minutes.

Of course, besides the Portege R830’s very impressive battery life, it has plenty of things going for it too. In the initial pages of this review, we mentioned that at 1.4kg, it is very light for a fully equipped business notebook. It weighs almost as much as a MacBook Air, but it is also a fair bit thicker. To nitpick, it can feel hollow and toy-like at times when you hold it.

It’s LED back-lit 13.3-inch screen is protected by a piece of colored magnesium alloy (three colors to choose from) that is both stiff and light. This means the screen doesn’t have any flex whatsoever. We found that the keyboard and palm rest areas do not have much flex either, thanks to the same magnesium alloy used to construct the lid. The very comfortable chiclet keys, which you would be using most of the time, are slightly shallow, with less travel than usual. But they are built to be fairly robust and can definitely handle typists who like to lay it down hard.

Performance-wise, the R830 doesn’t break any speed records, nor is it built to. It’s built to have a long lasting battery life, and that’s exactly what it gives you. When it comes to regular multimedia, surfing the web and other mundane office-related things, the Portege R830 definitely won’t let you down. Its Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics does its job admirably well (except high-end gaming, of course).

We like everything about the machine, except for its price. At S$2,599, it is simply too expensive for the average consumer. Then again, there are watered down Core i5 versions if you’re on a budget constraint (S$2,199) that won't present much of a performance hit. But in a nutshell, if you are shopping for a portable business-centric notebook and is not willing to sacrifice the optical drive, the Toshiba Portege R830 should be firmly in your sights.