Toshiba serves up ultra-wide-screen, budget Satellite U845W and U845 ultrabooks

Toshiba used to have just one ultrabook line: the Portege Z835. Toshiba's added to its ultrabooks arsenal with a new pair of Satellite models: one's an affordable mainstream $749 model, the other's a wide-screen 14-incher that feels like it escaped the concept lab. And as for that Portege, it's been upgraded to Ivy Bridge processors and renamed the Portege Z935. We took a look at all of Toshiba's latest ultrabooks up close; here are our impressions and details on the ultrabook trio.

All three of Toshiba's new ultrabooks sail under $1,000: the Satellite U845 starts at $749, the new Portege Z935 series starts at $899, and the Satellite U845W starts at $999. The Satellite U845 and U845W, both newcomers, have a denser feel than the wafer-thin Portege Z. They're both 14-inch ultrabooks, meaning they can be thicker than the standard 13-inch Intel specs and still be called an ultrabook.

The Satellite U845W has a shockingly wide 14.4-inch screen with a whopping 21:9 aspect ratio and a 1,792x768-pixel resolution. It's thicker than the average 13-incher at 0.82 inch, and comes in either a solid-state or hybrid hard drive configuration. Will a letterbox-free enhanced-audio entertainment ultrabook make sense? Read our first take hands-on.

The Satellite U845 has back-to-school written all over it: at $749, it's one of the less-expensive ultrabooks with an Intel processor. The U845 comes with a third-gen Intel Core i-series ultrabook CPU, a hybrid 500GB hard drive with 16 or 32GB of SSD flash storage, up to 6GB of RAM, 1 USB 3.0 port with Sleep & Charge, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, Ethernet, and an SD card slot. It looks more like a very slimmed-down Satellite laptop than a Portege, but with clean looks reminiscent of the Samsung Series 5 Ultra. Weighing in at four pounds and "under an inch thin" according to Toshiba's press release (we didn't have a tape measure), this ice-blue aluminum ultrabook's dimensions aren't far off that of a fuller-size slim laptop.

The Portege Z935 isn't any different in appearance from the Z800 ultrabook we've already reviewed, but it comes with the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors. The magnesium-alloy Z935 remains the smallest of the three by far, at 0.65 inches thin and 2.5 pounds. The $899 starting price is higher than the increasingly aggressive prices we saw on the Z835, but Toshiba's thin laptops have had a habit lately of hitting excellent retail prices at places like Best Buy.

Stay tuned for availability details, but for now be sure to check out our detailed hands-on video with the Satellite U845W, and click above for detailed comparison pictures.