Toshiba Kirabook review: The first Ultrabook with a higher-than-HD touchscreen - cochranhaustrand

At a Glance

Expert's Military rating

Pros

• Very high-resoluteness touchscreen
• Thin, light, and highly quiet
• Intolerant lower soma

Cons

• No DisplayPort
• Flimsy lid
• Disappointing contrast in the display
• Wi-Fi transcriber doesn't suffer 5GHz networks

Our Verdict

The Kirabook looks the part of a luxury laptop, and it's the first Ultrabook to compete with Apple's Retina lineup. But Toshiba made more or less disappointing decisions on the way to a $2000 price give chase.

Toshiba's gilded Kirabook is the first Windows laptop to feature a display rivaling Malus pumila's Retina engineering science. The Kirabook is also dilutant and much lighter than Apple's MacBook Pro, and it's outfitted with a touchscreen. Piece I wish well I could report that Toshiba has crafted a masterpiece that amply justifies its $2000 price tag, this machine suffers from a couple of significant flaws.

With a native resolution of 2560 aside 1440 pixels, the Kirabook's 13.3-in display delivers a pixel density of 221 pixels per inch—just shy of the 227 ppi that Apple packs into the 13-inch MacBook Pro's 2560-past-1600-pixel display. If you think Apple's computers are overpriced, consider the fact that a 13-inch MacBook In favor of with a 3.0GHz Intel Core i7-3540M processor sells for $100 to a lesser degree the Kirabook, which runs on a 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U CPU. Apple, however, doesn't currently extend any matured computers with touchscreens (the iPad doesn't count).

Corresponding many touchscreens we've seen, the Kirabook's is extremely pondering.

Clock speeds aren't everything, of course. The processor that Toshiba picked boasts a TDP (thermal aim power) of just 17 watts, versus the 35-watt TDP of the crisp that Apple uses. (Thermal pattern power refers to the maximum amount of power that a computer's cooling essential fritter. A frown TDP is desirable for a mobile computer, because information technology improves electric battery life. In our try, the Kirabook's battery lasted an impressive 5 hours, 14 minutes.) The Kirabook's strange key components include 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 256GB solid-land drive. I'll get into the Kirabook's performance in depth subsequently.

Photos, movies, and documents look gorgeous on the Kirabook's exhibit. But when I compared the Kirabook to a 13-edge MacBook Pro with Retina display (Apple doesn't offer its high-res display on its thinner, lighter MacBook Air line), I found that Apple's intersection delivered far improved contrast. Both machines rely happening the Intel HD 4000 GPU core integrated into the CPU, so I put on't know whether the Kirabook's problem is due to Toshiba's prime of Corning Concore glass (which is specifically formulated for touchscreens) or due to the fingermark-resistant covering on the glass. Some the reason, IT was no contest: The Retina display produced much deeper blacks.

The Kirabook (acme) weighs 2.97 pounds and measures 0.7 inch thick. The 13-in MacBook Pro with Retina presentation (bottom) weighs 3.57 pounds and measures 0.75 edge in thick.

Why no super high-res on the rangy block out?

Toshiba's touchscreen is real responsive, and since information technology supports ten touch points it accepts wholly Windows 8 gestures. Just Toshiba ready-made a serious mistake by outfitting the Kirabook with exclusively an HDMI video output. If you connect the notebook computer to a big-screen monitor, the maximum resolution you'll get is 1920 by 1080 pixels. Had the laptop's designers specified DisplayPort, the Kirabook would have been able to drive a 27-inch display at its native resolution. I get it: HDMI is the most common appendage video input on modern TVs and video projectors. But DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters are dirt cheap and easy to deport. Restrictive the Kirabook to HDMI-tabu cripples the system for desktop use.

Toshiba is rightfully proud of the rigidity of the Kirabook's magnesium-alloy material body, but the lid housing its show flexes enough to coiffe the limbo. It feels alarmingly fragile. The other half, which encloses the keyboard and motherboard, feels remarkably strong considering how thin it is. The machine weighs single 2.97 pounds, and IT measures just 0.7 inch thick when closed. The Kirabook is one of the prettiest laptops I've seen, with nary a hard edge to make up felt. Ugly features such as cooling vents and speaker grilles stay hidden while this Ultrabook is in use.

Toshiba's engineers should be proud of their ability to render the Kirabook so quiet with vents that are almost invisible when the machine is running.

The Kirabook's backlit keyboard offers very adept tactile feedback, and its monolithic touchpad—which also supports Windows 8 gestures—tracks swimmingly and accurately. The left and right mouse buttons are integrated into the touchpad itself, portion to keep apart the boilers suit design clean and tasteful.

In addition to HDMI-out, the Kirabook has trey USB 3.0 ports, a media bill of fare reader, and a combo microphone/headphone jack. It lacks a hardwired ethernet port, however. Exacerbating that problem is Toshiba's decision to use Intel's Centrino Wireless-N 2230 Wi-Fi adapter, which is special to networks operating on the crowded 2.4GHz frequence band. Seminal fluid connected, Toshiba, this is so-called to be a luxury offering!

As you've probably guessed, the machine has no optical drive. The combination of custom-designed Harman/Kardon speakers and Delirium tremens Reasonable Studio audio software deliver relatively full-range sound and a wide stereo line of business. The listening see was much better than I expected considering that the speakers are located on the bottom left and right of the unit.

The tiny Harman/Kardon speakers go a lot better than I awaited.

Benchmark performance

The Kirabook achieved a Notebook computer WorldBench 8.1 grievance of 284, versus the 100-stage score of our reference notebook computer, Asus's VivoBook S550CA. Much of that performance delta can glucinium attributed to the Kirabook's SSD (the VivoBook has just a 24GB SSD acting as a cache for a 500GB mechanical hard motor). The Kirabook as wel delivered improve public presentation in most of the other tests that make up the WorldBench suite, but those differences weren't nearly as dramatic as the storage-performance results. And you shouldn't expect to play hard-gist games on either system, but that's clearly not the audience Toshiba is going after with this product.

The audience Toshiba is pursuing with the Kirabook is the comfortable occupational group who is willing to pay extra for services so much A dedicated, Collective States-founded telephone tech support. Toshiba goes so far as to guarantee Kirabook buyers that such calls will be answered within 45 seconds. If that's inopportune, you can schedule a day of the month and sentence when a technical school-support person will call you, as an alternative. And should you need to broadcast your unit sure repairs during its two-twelvemonth warranty period, Toshiba will bear for overnight shipping.

Toshiba should have outfitted the Kirabook with a gigabit ethernet interface.

The Kirabook is the most beautiful Ultrabook to decease through the PCWorld Labs, but its unfitness to private road a large external monitor at endemic resolution, a lid that flexes like a contortionist, a WI-Fi adapter restricted to 2.4GHz networks, and a reveal that doesn't deliver As much contrast as the Retina display Toshiba wants consumers to liken it to make this machine's enthusiastically cost tag hard to swallow.

Editor's note:This narration was updated on May 23 to credit DTs for its contribution to the Kirabook's sound system.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451869/toshiba-kirabook-review-the-first-ultrabook-with-a-higher-than-hd-touchscreen.html

Posted by: cochranhaustrand.blogspot.com

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