Toshiba Portege R705

Stuck on the Toshiba Portege R705's magnesium alloy palmrest is a shiny sticker celebrating the company's 25 years of "laptop innovation." Now, we're the first to hate on the plethora of decals that festoon Windows laptops these days -- and this one also deserves to be peeled off and tossed into the garbage -- but the sticker actually happens to speaks volumes about why the $800 R705 is such a big deal. We promise to keep the history lesson short, but for years the Portege series has been Toshiba's top-of-the-line ultraportable brand, featuring the latest CPUs while usually setting the standard for portability, and always been attached to seriously hefty price tags. Take the Portege R500, which was the worlds lightest laptop in 2007, and cost two grand. 

The Portege R705, which is exclusive to Best Buy for now, changes that formula. And in celebration of the big two-five, Toshiba's put out a 3.2-pound, Core i3-powered stunner that's less than half the price of past Porteges. Oh, and did we mention it has an on-board optical drive, 500GB of storage, Intel's wireless display technology and promises 8.5 hours of battery life? We won't beat around the bush -- it's impressive.

Performance-wise, the R705 was very comparable to the number of Core i3 laptops we've reviewed lately. Actually, just like the Acer TimelineX 4820T and the Sony EC Series, it's configured with a 2.26GHz Core i3-350M and 4GB of RAM. It kept up with our everyday routine of writing in Microsoft Word, checking our Twitter feed in TweetDeck, surfing the web in Firefox, and chatting through Trillian. Watching a DVD with those programs open in the background was also a breeze. For those that demand more power, the Toshiba R700 has the same chassis, but will be configurable on Toshiba's site with Core i5 / i7 CPUs as well as with solid state drive options. Our unit had a 500GB hard drive with Windows 7 Home Premium. The hard drive accelerometer is a nice safety addition, but it's rather sensitive, so you'll probably want to disable the alerts. 

The R705 relies on Intel's integrated HD graphics, and though we've been thinking the machine would be a perfect candidate for NVIDIA's Optimus, unfortunately for now we've yet to see any laptops with the two technologies (though, NVIDIA claims they can live in harmony). Regardless, the integrated option was fine for playing back high-def YouTube videos and regular flash video on Hulu and Amazon, but it won't satisfy those that want to play some high resolution games. 

One of our major – and frankly one of our only -- concerns about the R705 has to do with its warm temperatures. Toshiba has worked on a new Airflow cooling technology that pulls fresh air from the fan on the bottom left of the system, and then directs the warm air out the left vent. It's a cool idea (oh yes, pun intended), but the left edge of the laptop does become incredibly warm during CPU-intensive tasks like playing Flash content -- and when we watched an episode of Mad Men the bottom of the system became quite warm as well. We'd say the heat on the R705 was worse than that on the TimelineX 4820T, actually. However, during our normal everyday usage -- surfing the web, chatting, listening to music -- we weren't bothered by the heat even when we had the machine on our lap. 

Toshiba's promised 8.5 hours of battery life seemed quite unrealistic to us, and in reality it was actually about half of that. The R750's 66Wh six-cell battery lasted four hours and 25 minutes on our video rundown test, which loops the same standard definition video with screen brightness set at 65 percent. That's very comparable to the TimelineX 4820T, and in our everyday use with WiFi on and brightness at 85 percent we squeezed about five hours out. It's a decent runtime, but it's not going to last the flight from New York to London. 

It was a relief to boot up the R705 and find the desktop virtually spot free – the little Recycle Bin icon in the top left corner was no bother. However, Toshiba still loads up the ultraportable with some added software, including its Bulletin Board and webcam programs. Also, because the system is a special to Best Buy, it comes with Best Buy's own software installer. Blech. 

Wrap-up

Remind us to thank Toshiba for celebrating its 25th year in the laptop business with the R705. Despite some heat issues, the $800 Portege R705 was simply impressive. Flat out, consumers haven't been able to get such a feature-packed ultraportable at such an affordable price until now, and the cheaper price tag doesn't result in a shoddy build as we expected it might.