Toshiba Kirabook (2014) review: The high-end Kirabook gets a battery life upgrade

The first generation of Toshiba's Kirabook was an ambitious shot at creating a high-end product with MacBook-like buzz. That slim 13-inch magnesium-alloy laptop was even the first post-Retina PC we'd seen with a better-than-HD screen resolution -- a feature now becoming increasingly common in the upper reaches of the laptop market.

8.5

Toshiba Kirabook (2014)

The Good

The slim, lightweight <b>Toshiba Kirabook</b> still feels very premium, and it deserves credit for being one of the first Windows laptops to feature a better-than-HD display. Thanks to an updated CPU, battery life is now good enough for all-day use.

The Bad

Higher-res screens are more common now, and available for less. The generic brushed-metal look isn't particularly distinctive given the price.

The Bottom Line

The design of Toshiba's high-end Kirabook hasn't changed since last year, but it has aged gracefully. The components get an update and the battery life gets a big boost, making this an all-around excellent, but expensive, ultrabook.

Despite many excellent high-end features, the original Kirabook fell short because its design didn't move the needle much, battery life was underwhelming, and the least-expensive model skipped the touch screen, despite a $1,600 price.

Roughly 10 months later, the second-gen Kirabook aims to correct at least a few of these missteps, and thanks to a new processor and some adjustments to features and prices, it feels like a much better machine, despite offering no overhaul of the physical design.

The second-gen Kirabook has two fixed-configuration models, both of which include the eye-popping 2,560x1,440 touch screen display. A $1,499 version has a current-gen Intel Core i5, while our $1,699 review unit has an Intel Core i7 CPU -- both have 8GB of RAM and a big 256GB SSD.

Perhaps because the past year has seen a steady stream of somewhat clunky hybrids and so-so fauxtrabooks, and nothing new or exciting from Apple in terms of laptop design, I find myself appreciating the Kirabook more the second time around. It helps, of course, that the battery life is now more in line with what one would expect from a laptop in this price range, and that there's no misguided non-touch version to confuse shoppers.

Design and features
The Kirabook is pitched as a premium product, and it certainly feels like one. The thin, light body is made of a magnesium alloy, which is both lighter and stronger than aluminum, and the desktop footprint is noticeably smaller than the 13-inch MacBook Air or Pro. At a hair under 3 pounds, it weighs the same as the Air, but less than the 13-inch MacBook Pro by nearly half a pound.

But, the Kirabook, while very nice, is not exactly distinctive. As with the original version, the gentle brushed metal look is hard to discern from Toshiba's sub-$1,000 systems at even a few feet away. Acer, with the Aspire S7, and Samsung, with the Series 9, manage to put together excellent 13-inch ultrabooks with industrial design that stands out from the crowd. The Kirabook is arguably better-made than either of those, but plays it a little too close to the vest, aesthetically.

The keyboard, like most recent Toshiba examples, combines slightly rectangular keys with a shorter-than-most spacebar. But unlike the versions in Toshiba's more mainstream laptops, the keyboard here feels rock-solid, with no flex, even under heavy typing, and satisfyingly deep keystrokes. The keyboard is also, as one would expect at this level, backlit.

The large rectangular clickpad is elongated, almost letterboxed, compared with the more squared-off versions on most other laptops. Two-finger multitouch gestures, such as scrolling down a long web page, work fine, which is an improvement over last year's Kirabook, which suffered from some touch-pad twitchiness.

As with the original Kirabook, and other better-than-HD laptops since, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus, and Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, the real highlight here is the high-resolution screen. At 2,560x1,440 pixels, it's still playing in fairly rarified air, although there are many more better-than-HD displays today than when the first Kirabook was released. More importantly, some of them are significantly less expensive, with the Yoga 2 Pro getting down to $999 while keeping its 3,200x1,800-pixel display.

Some parts of the Windows ecosystem adapt well to these higher screen resolutions, while others do not. The actual Windows 8 tiles interface does, along with every Windows 8 app we tested. The traditional Windows desktop also works well, but some programs, including the copy of Photoshop Elements 11 that came preloaded on the system, ended up with text and menus that were so small as to be nearly impossible to read. A higher-resolution screen remains a cool extra feature to have on a laptop, especially for smooth text and more screen real estate for editing photo and video, but it's not a necessity for most.

Connections, performance, and battery
Slim laptops often skimp on the ports, but in this case, you get three USB 3.0 ports, which is one more than you'll find on a MacBook Air or Pro (although those include one or two Thunderbolt ports). Note that one of the USB ports also supports Toshiba's useful sleep-and-charge technology, that can draw power from the battery to charge accessories even when the system is off. The HDMI port supports 4K output in the rare event that you have an external monitor with a resolution that's as good or better than the internal one.

The two available configurations of the Kirabook are largely similar, with the less expensive model using a fourth-gen Intel Core i5 processor and the higher-end model using a Core i7. Compared with the original third-gen Core i7 Kirabook we reviewed last year, the performance differences were essentially nonexistent. Overall, we've seen very minor bumps to performance generation-over-generation, especially from higher-end Intel CPUs, with the real advantage coming from improved battery life.

And battery life is really where the updated Kirabook outdoes its predecessor. The 2013 Kirabook ran for 5 hours and 5 minutes on our video playback battery drain test, which was middling for a travel-friendly ultrabook. The 2014 version ran for 7 hours and 51 minutes on the same test, which is an outstanding improvement, and a number I'd call good enough for all-day professional use. Some similar systems still run even longer, including the Samsung Ative Book 9 Plus and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Conclusion
The original Toshiba Kirabook was a well-intentioned attempt to capture some boutique-level mindshare from other high-end, high-design laptops. Despite excellent craftsmanship, it missed on enough levels, from oddball price/feature combos to disappointing battery life, to fall just short of a strong recommendation.

Despite no design update, the newer version presents itself much better, dropping the pointless nontouch version and adding a major battery life boost. It helps that in the intervening months no one has put forth a killer high-end ultrabook that targets the same CEO-level demographic, making the Kirabook, almost by default, a laptop I could see myself gravitating towards if my budget allowed for it.

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