Toshiba Kirabook

Toshiba Kirabook

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Toshiba Laptop Battery

Toshiba's luxurious Kirabook is the first Windows laptop to feature a display rivaling Apple’s Retina technology. The Kirabook is also thinner and much lighter than Apple’s MacBook Pro, and it’s outfitted with a touchscreen. While I wish I could report that Toshiba has crafted a masterpiece that fully justifies its $2000 price tag, this machine suffers from a couple of significant flaws.

With a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, the Kirabook’s 13.3-inch display delivers a pixel density of 221 pixels per inch—just shy of the 227 ppi that Apple packs into the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s 2560-by-1600-pixel display. If you think Apple’s computers are overpriced, consider the fact that a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 3.0GHz Intel Core i7-3540M processor sells for $100 less than the Kirabook which with battery such as Toshiba PA3635U-1BRM Battery, Toshiba PA3636U-1BRL Battery, Toshiba PA3728U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3817U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PABAS228 Battery, Toshiba PA3818U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3634U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba Portege M800 Battery, Toshiba Satellite L310 Battery, Toshiba Satellite L510 Battery, Toshiba Portege T130 Battery, Toshiba Satellite U400 Battery, which runs on a 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U CPU. Apple, however, doesn't currently offer any full-blown computers with touchscreens (the iPad doesn't count).

Clock speeds aren’t everything, of course. The processor that Toshiba picked boasts a TDP (thermal design power) of just 17 watts, versus the 35-watt TDP of the chip that Apple uses. (Thermal design power refers to the maximum amount of power that a computer’s cooling system must dissipate. A lower TDP is desirable for a mobile computer, because it improves battery life. In our test, the Kirabook’s battery lasted an impressive 5 hours, 14 minutes.) The Kirabook’s other key components include 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. I’ll get into the Kirabook’s performance in depth later.

The Kirabook achieved a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 284, versus the 100-point score of our reference notebook, Asus’s VivoBook S550CA. Much of that performance delta can be attributed to the Kirabook’s SSD (the VivoBook has just a 24GB SSD acting as a cache for a 500GB mechanical hard drive). The Kirabook also delivered better performance in most of the other tests that make up the WorldBench suite, but those differences weren’t nearly as dramatic as the storage-performance results. And you shouldn’t expect to play hard-core games on either system, but that’s clearly not the audience Toshiba is going after with this product.

The audience Toshiba is pursuing with the Kirabook is the well-to-do professional who is willing to pay extra for services such as dedicated, United States-based telephone tech support. Toshiba goes so far as to guarantee Kirabook buyers that such calls will be answered within 45 seconds. If that’s inconvenient, you can schedule a date and time when a tech-support person will call you, instead. And should you need to send your unit in for repairs during its two-year warranty period, Toshiba will pay for overnight shipping.

The Kirabook is the most beautiful Ultrabook to pass through the PCWorld Labs, but its inability to drive a large external monitor at native resolution, a lid that flexes like a contortionist, a Wi-Fi adapter restricted to 2.4GHz networks, and a display that doesn’t deliver as much contrast as the Retina display Toshiba wants consumers to compare it to make this machine’s sky-high price tag hard to swallow.