The
Z835 has a professional-looking design with normal straight lines and
squared-off edges; Toshiba’s Portege line of notebooks has typically been
business oriented so this makes sense. The Z835 will most certainly draw
wandering eyes despite its utilitarian appearance due to the sheer thinness –
it really is that thin at only 0.63 inches high. The chassis is constructed
entirely of magnesium alloy, a lightweight yet strong material. As a result the
Z835 feels like almost nothing at 2.4 pounds.
The
Portege Z835 configuration we tested features a Core i3-2367M running at a
paltry 1.4GHz with no Turbo Mode. The system also has 4GB of RAM and a 128GB
solid-state drive, though not a particularly fast one. The result in our tests
was a disappointing WorldBench 6 score of 79 a lower mark than we’ve seen from
any other Ultrabook so far. Forget about modern gaming, as this laptop doesn’t
break 30 frames per second even at low resolutions with low quality settings.
The
thinness of Ultrabooks prevents them from packing much beyond the bare
essentials. Fortunately the Z835 makes what space is available count; it has
full-size HDMI and VGA-out ports as well as a single USB 3.0 port. The Z835
lacks ExpressCard and DisplayPort. All picture descriptions are left to right.