Toshiba Portege R835 review: Toshiba Portege R835

Reviewing the Toshiba Portege R835-P88 is like revisiting an old friend. Previous versions of this laptop have won our coveted Editors' Choice Award, by offering excellent all-around performance in a slim, lightweight 13-inch body, for a lot less than you'd expect.

7.7

Toshiba Portege R835

The Good

This latest version of the <b>Toshiba Portege R835</b> is still a great value, packing a big hard drive, optical drive, and full-power processor into a chassis not much bigger than an ultrabook.

The Bad

This 13-inch laptop once felt thin and light, but similarly priced newer laptops beat it on style and portability.

The Bottom Line

This one-time favorite is still an excellent go-to 13-inch laptop, if you don't need something quite as slim as an ultrabook, and you can get it for the right price.

But since we reviewed the last version of the R835, a seismic shift in 13-inch laptops has occurred, thanks to the growing popularity of the ultrabook. The R835 now feels big and a little bulky compared to the 20mm-or-less 13-inch ultrabooks from Dell, HP, and even Toshiba's own Z835, which are all available for around $899-$999 for a similar Intel Core i5 configuration, but with a 128GB SSD instead of the R835's standard platter hard drive.

But despite not being the newest or sexiest 13-inch laptop around, the Portege R835 still comes off as an excellent full-featured 13-inch laptop. This specific configuration, the R835-P88, has 6GB of RAM, a big 640GB HDD, and includes features missing from most ultrabooks, such as an optical drive and Intel's Wireless Display technology. While most retailers have this system listed at between $850 and $950, it's currently available on NewEgg for $699, which is an excellent deal.

If you're looking for the thinnest and lightest 13-inch around, take the same money and put it toward an under-$1,000 ultrabook. But if you're willing to trade some portability for features and a great price, the scrappy little Toshiba Portege R835 remains one of our go-to laptop picks.

Physically, this version of the Toshiba Portege R835 is identical to previous models we've reviewed. Many of those earlier observations stand, but the recent ultrabook trend changes the expectations of what a slim midpriced 13-inch laptop should look and feel like, leaving the R835 looking chunky (but still feeling very light in the hand).

The R835 has a subtle dark blue tint to its brushed-metal magnesium alloy chassis. The bottom half of the body feels sturdy despite its light weight, but there's a bit of flex in the lid. This is still a smart-looking consumer/business crossover laptop, but it also keeps the one visual element we disliked last time: the chromed screen hinges, which just look cheap.

Previously, you'd have to spend a lot more on something like a MacBook Air or a Samsung Series 9 in order to get a thinner 13-inch laptop. Today, ultrabooks such as Toshiba's own Z835 offer slimmer bodies for around the same price or just a bit more.

The keyboard, like most current consumer laptop keyboards, uses flat, widely spaced island-style keys. Toshiba's keyboards typically have a vertical row of dedicated Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys along the right side. This makes them easy to find, but at the same time pushes the Enter and Right Shift keys in from where you'd instinctively expect them to be.

Media control buttons, volume, mute, and so on can also be hard to find, relegated to alternate F-key assignments and indicated in dark gray icons on black keys. The R835 still lacks a backlit keyboard, which many thinner ultrabooks have managed to work in. It would be a major plus to have in this case.

The decent-size touch pad is acceptable, and it has separate left and right mouse buttons, rather than being the all-in-one click pad style we're seeing more of these days. The mouse buttons are on the small and clacky side, but work well enough.

The 13.3-inch display has a native resolution of 1,366x768 pixels -- the same as most of the ultrabooks we've seen (by way of comparison, the MacBook Air's screen has a 1,440x900-pixel resolution). Though bright, the off-axis viewing angles on the R835 weren't great. Likewise, we've never been impressed with the onboard audio in the Portege laptops; the R835 speakers are audible but pretty lackluster.

Compared to a standard ultrabook or the MacBook Air, the Portege R835 has a generous selection of ports and connections. Bluetooth is the most obvious missing element, but the inclusion of an eSATA port is rare on a 13-inch laptop, and it's still a pretty handy way to hook up a large external hard drive.

This particular configuration of the Portege R835, called the R835-P88, is ever so slightly different from the pair of earlier versions we reviewed. Those 2011 models both had Intel Core i5-2410 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. This one has a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2450 CPU and 6GB of RAM, along with the same 640GB hard drive as before. That won't make a huge difference in everyday use, but the extra RAM is nice. At the list price of $849, it's acceptable but not a bargain. But, we've seen it for as little as $699, which is a pretty fantastic overall value, considering the big hard drive and extra RAM.

In our CNET Labs benchmark tests, the Portege R835-P88 performed as one would expect from a laptop with this very common mainstream CPU. It was closely tied with systems such as the HP Pavilion dm4 and just slightly faster than the R835-P56X configuration we tested previously. None of these slight differences in performance, however, were significant enough that you'd notice them while Web surfing, playing back media, or working on office documents.

The R835 did, however, far outperform Toshiba's popular low-cost ultrabook, the Portege Z835-P330, which gets its price down to $799 or so by dropping the CPU to a slower Intel Core i3. A $1,000-plus version of that Toshiba ultrabook, the Z835-P370, traded up to a low-voltage Core i5 CPU and cut the speed difference in half, but it was still slower.

The Portege R835 line has always had impressive battery life, and this latest version ran for 6 hours and 42 minutes on our video playback battery drain test. That's better than just about anyone in the space, and just about the same as you'd get from a 13-inch MacBook Pro or Air. Other Windows laptop makers should look to this as an example.

Toshiba includes an industry-standard one-year parts and labor warranty with the system. Support is accessible through a 24-7 toll-free phone line, and a customized support search page can direct you to online documents and driver downloads for this specific model.

After being hit with a flood of thinner, lighter ultrabooks, it would be easy to dismiss the Toshiba Portege R835 as yesterday's news. And while it's not as impressive as it was when we first saw it, it's still a great go-to laptop that packs in a big hard drive and optical drive, while weighing less than some laptop labeled as actual ultrabooks (such as the Samsung Series 5 Ultra).

Multimedia multitasking test (in seconds)

(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

HP Pavilion dm4-3090se
553

Toshiba Portege R835-P88

561

Samsung QX411-W01UB

571

Sony Vaio VPCSA41FX/BL

582

Toshiba Portege R835-P56X

599

Toshiba Portege Z835-P330

1,109

Adobe Photoshop CS3 image-processing test (in seconds)

(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Toshiba Portege R835-P88
84

HP Pavilion dm4-3090se

86

Sony Vaio VPCSA41FX/BL

87

Toshiba Portege R835-P56X

90

Samsung QX411-W01UB

96

Toshiba Portege Z835-P330

175

Apple iTunes encoding test (in seconds)

(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

HP Pavilion dm4-3090se
113

Toshiba Portege R835-P88

113

Samsung QX411-W01UB

116

Sony Vaio VPCSA41FX/BL

116

Toshiba Portege R835-P56X

120

Toshiba Portege Z835-P330

304

Video playback battery drain test (in minutes)

(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Toshiba Portege R835-P56X
421

Toshiba Portege R835-P88

402

Samsung QX411-W01UB

365

Toshiba Portege Z835-P330

316

HP Pavilion dm4-3090se

257

Sony Vaio VPCSA41FX/BL

204

Annual energy consumption cost

Toshiba Portege Z835-P330

$2.69

Toshiba Portege R835-P56X

$3.96

Samsung QX411-W01UB

$4.02

Toshiba Portege R835-P88

$4.48

HP Pavilion dm4-3090se

$4.48

Sony Vaio VPCSA41FX/BL

$5.54

Find out more about how we test laptops.

System configurations
Toshiba Portege R835-P88
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2450M; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 640GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Sony Vaio VPCSA41FX/BL
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2450M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6630M / Intel HD 3000; 500GB Toshiba 5,400rpm

HP Pavilion dm4-3090se
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2450M; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated) Intel HD 3000; 520GB Intel 7,200rpm

Toshiba Portege Z835-P330
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated)/1,696MB (Total) Intel GMA HD; 640GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Samsung QX411-W01
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.4GHz Intel Core i5-2430M; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 640GB Seagate 5,400rpm