Toshiba Kirabook (Core i7) (Toshiba) Design: 7.0 Features: 8.0 Performance: 8.0 The good: The Toshiba Kirabook is made of superior materials and has an unusually high-resolution display. The bad: The design doesnt wow, considering the high price. Battery life is merely OK, and the least expensive version omits a touch screen. The bottom line: Toshibas ambitious Kirabook has a screen that rivals Apples MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and a price to match. Its a solid, useful laptop, but for these prices, the design should really be more exciting. What makes one laptop worth $900 and another worth $2,200? Thats a tricky question, and one that has bedeviled PC makers looking to join a handful of companies such as Apple in charging a premium price for products that, at the end of the day, use many of the same components as less expensive items. The new Kirabook from Toshiba attacks this question head on. This 13-inch laptop starts at a bold $1,800, and goes up from there. The unit reviewed here is $2,200 because it adds a touch screen and a faster Intel Core i7 processor (thats right, the $1,800 starting price does not include a touch screen -- thats a add-on at extra cost). Toshiba is pitching the Kirabook as the first product in a new high-end line, also called Kira, which will complement the existing Satellite, Portege, and Qosmio lines. As the company already makes some very nice ultrabooks for very reasonable prices, the challenge with the Kirabook is to pull out all the stops to justify its high price and the heavy hype Toshiba is putting behind the new line. And the Kirabook is clearly a premium product. Its thin, light body is made of a magnesium alloy, which is both lighter and stronger than aluminum; the keyboard and touch pad are better than those found on standard Toshiba Satellite laptops; and most notably, the 13.3-inch display has an incredibly high 2,560x1,440-pixel resolution. Toshiba calls this PixelPure, and its not dissimilar to the Retina Display Apple uses in its highest-end MacBook Pro laptops. Standard laptop screens top out at 1,920x1,080 pixels. Of course, just as we said of the Retina MacBooks, theres little consumer content right now that takes advantage of higher-than-1080p screen resolutions, which is the same problem first-generation 4K televisions are facing. High-res gaming is also out of the question, as the Kirabook relies on Intels default HD 4000 graphics. Where the higher resolution really wows is in reading plain text (which is more exciting than it sounds), and working in apps such as Photoshop, where the higher resolution lets you fit more on the screen at once. Other than the excellent construction and standout screen, this is in many ways a standard Intel Core i5/i7 laptop, with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive (to its credit, Toshiba adds two years of Platinum support) In fact, when it and Toshibas excellent Satellite U845T 14-inch ultrabook are placed side by side, the two look remarkably similar. And therein lies the issue Im having with the Kirabook. It looks more upscale than the Satellite, and feels better in the hand, but only incrementally. If you placed both laptops in front of consumers and asked them to guess the price difference between them, theres absolutely zero chance anyone would get it right. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display starts at $100 less, albeit with less SSD storage and an aluminum body thats larger and weighs more -- but weve also knocked that Apple laptop for not offering the right combination of features and price. But the MacBook Pro also has more-distinct industrial design, as do other laptops that have played in this price range, such as the Acer Aspire S7 and the Samsung Series 9. The lesson here is that to play in the rarified air of the $1,800-plus laptop market, you need to bring a distinct, high-design look and feel, not just top-end components. The Kirabook is an excellent laptop thats highly portable and easy to use, with a great-looking screen that only a few other systems can even come close to touching. That said, it just doesnt look like a expensive laptop, and for that kind of money, I want to be wowed, and I suspect you do, as well. Processor 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3667U Memory 8GB, 1,600MHz DDR3 Hard drive 256GB SSD Graphics Intel HD 4000 Operating system Windows 8 Dimensions (WD) 12.4x8.2 inches Height 0.7 inch Screen size (diagonal) 13.3 inches System weight / Weight with AC adapter 2.9 pounds / 3.4 pounds Category 13-inch ultrabook Design and features The Kirabook may be found in a museum someday, listed as a prime example of 2013 ultrabook design. All the hallmarks are there: the slightly tapered front edge, the brushed-metal look of the lid, the edge-to-edge glass over the display, and the large button-free clickpad under the island-style keyboard. And, if you only see the Kirabook in photos, that might be the end of your observations. This is one of those products that comes off better in person than on paper, and in the hand, the Kirabook really does feel like a high-end laptop. The magnesium-alloy body is very light, but feels sturdy. The fit and finish are excellent, with a clean keyboard tray and a stiff hinge that runs nearly the full length of the system, and even the grilles for the Harman Kardon speakers and system fan have been moved to the bottom panel to keep them out of sight (that fan, however, can get pretty loud at times). The backlit keyboard follows the general Toshiba model of slightly rectangular keys, with a shorter-than-most spacebar. But the keyboard is a marked improvement over the similar-looking one on most of Toshibas less expensive laptops. Theres zero flex under your fingers, and the actual keys are deeper (more travel) than on other Toshiba ultrabooks. The large rectangular clickpad offers a lot of surface area for such a small laptop, and with Windows 8, youll want that for all those OS navigation gestures. The pads surface has just the right amount of resistance, but I occasionally had trouble getting it to recognize a two-finger scroll, despite playing around with the Synaptics software settings. The biggest selling point of the Kirabook is its high-resolution PixelPure screen. At 2,560x1,440 pixels, its in a class that only a handful of other devices reach, including Apples Retina MacBook Pro line. Toshiba says that resolution equals 221 pixels per inch, and when reading onscreen text and viewing videos with higher-than-1080p resolution (which can hard to find, but YouTube has many), its a great visual experience. Windows 8 adapts to the resolution well, keeping things looking normal in its tile-based interface. Going back to the traditional desktop view can be jarring -- text and icons appear very small by default. Still, as mentioned above, theres not much content that takes proper advantage of the expanded resolution. Is a higher-resolution screen a great extra feature to have on a laptop? Definitely -- especially if its a touch-screen system with easy pinch-to-zoom for larger text. Is it a must-have? Its hard to say yes -- the appeal of the Retina MacBook Pro line is really more the thinner, more powerful hardware when compared with the non-Retina MacBook Pro than the screen itself. Toshiba Kirabook Average for category [13-inch] Video HDMI HDMI or DisplayPort Audio Stereo speakers, combo headphone/microphone jack Stereo speakers, headphone/microphone jacks Data 3 USB 3.0 (1 with sleep-and-charge) 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, SD card reader Networking 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Optical drive None None Connections, performance, and battery The Kirabook deserves credit for making all three of its USB ports of the faster 3.0 variety, plus one of them is a powered sleep-and-charge port, which is a handy feature allowing you to plug a device into the port and recharge from the laptops battery, even if the system is powered down. Other than that, you wont find any high-end extras, such as an NFC chip or Thunderbolt port. There are three configurations of the Kirabook. The least expensive, trading down to a Core i5 CPU, but with the same 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD as the other versions. The big difference here is that it does not include a touch screen. Thats surprising on two fronts. First, that someone is still interested in making a Windows 8 ultrabook without a touch screen; and second, that it would cost so much. The version without a touch screen is a little lighter, so theres always that. Adding a touch screen costs a surprising extra value, for what is essentially the same configuration. The next step is our review configuration, which adds a Core i7 processor, and upgrades the operating system to Windows 8 Pro. All three configurations include copies of Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 and Adobe Premiere Elements 11, and a special Platinum level of support, which consists of a two-year warranty, a special 24-7 support phone number to call, setup assistance, and a promised annual tune-up. Take an ultrabook and pack in an Intel Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a large SSD, and youre virtually guaranteed to get excellent performance. The Kirabook does indeed perform like a premium laptop, and ran our benchmark tests as well or better than other U-series Core i7 laptops. Plus, the system was able to play higher-resolution videos easily, including 4K videos. But, considering the things most people use their laptops for -- Web surfing, media playback, social-network sharing, and e-mail -- youre not likely to notice a huge difference between this and a solid Core i5 ultrabook in everyday use. The HD 4000 graphics from Intel can handle some basic gaming, as long as you keep your expectations modest, and you dont try and run games at the systems native resolution. The new BioShock Infinite at 1,366x768-pixel resolution with medium settings ran at 16.1 frames per second. A high-end laptop needs high-end battery life. Working in the Kirabooks favor are the power-efficient CPU and SSD, but working against it is the need to drive many more pixels than the average laptop screen. In our video playback battery drain test (which uses a 1080p video), the Kirabook ran for 5 hours and 5 minutes. Thats good, but not especially impressive, considering that the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro ran for nearly 7 hours and the Toshiba U845T ran just over 6 hours. Conclusion When Toshiba first showed us the Kirabook in person, company reps asked my colleague and I what we thought the system would cost. We gave a couple of well-reasoned guesses, but came nowhere close to the actual range. But there is room for premium laptops even among todays price-sensitive shoppers. To make that leap, you really need a design that stands out from the lower crowd, and the Kirabook fails to do so, despite having a higher-resolution screen as its main selling point. That said, its a great example of a more expensive laptop built with superior construction and materials, and feels great to use while typing, tapping and swiping System configurations Toshiba Kirabook Windows 8 (64-bit); 2GHz Intel Core i7-3667U; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 32MB (Dedicated) Intel HD 4000; 256GB Toshiba SSD Dell XPS 13 Windows 8 (64-bit); 1.9GHz Intel Core i7; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 32MB (Sharedl) Intel HD 4000; 256GB Samsung SSD Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch w/ Retina Display (October 2012) OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-3210M, 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz, 768MB (Shared) Intel HD 4000, 256GB Apple SSD Acer Aspire S7-391-9886 Windows 8 (64-bit); 1.9GHz Intel Core i7-3517U; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 128MB (Shared) Intel HD 4000; 256GB Intel SSD Toshiba Satellite U845T-S4165 Windows 8 (64-bit); 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3337U; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 32MB (Dedicated) Intel HD 4000; 128GB Toshiba SSD
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:35:21 +0000
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