Travelers seeking an executive-class status symbol will be tempted by Toshiba’s flagship ultrabook, the Portege Z830-S8302 ($1,429 list). it puts a speedy Intel Core i7 chip into a magnesium alloy chassis that out-diets Apple’s MacBook Air 13-inch (Thunderbolt) ($1,299 direct, 4 stars), coming in at 2.5 pounds to the Apple Air’s and most Windows ultrabooks’ 2.9 pounds or so. It’s packed with features ranging from a fingerprint reader to a backlit keyboard.

It’s a lot more expensive than its Core i3–powered sibling, the Portege Z835-P330 ($799.99 at Best Buy, 3.5 stars). if all you need in an ultralight is Office and Outlook capability, the slower model is undeniably the, well, better buy. But if you regularly mix some photo editing or occasional video encoding with your word processing and Web surfing, or if you just want ultrabook bragging rights, you’ll want to inspect Toshiba’s top of the line—although you may find yourself wishing it actually weighed a few ounces more.

Design Although the Portege’s magnesium alloy frame makes its 1.6-by-12.4-by-8.9-inch (HWD) body relatively rigid—you can pick it up by a front corner with no problem—the same isn’t true of its super-thin screen. Grasp the latter by the corners and it will wiggle and flex, or start typing with the Toshiba in your lap and the display will vibrate and wobble to an annoying degree. The computer doesn’t really feel flimsy, but it definitely feels too flexible.

The screen looks good, though—it’s a 13.3-inch, LED-backlit matte panel with the same 1,366-by-768 resolution as every other ultrabook we’ve tested with the exception of the 1,600-by-900 Asus Zenbook UX31-RSL8 ($1,049 list, 4 stars), with ample brightness, sharp text, and crisp colors. I also liked the Toshiba’s touchpad, which works smoothly and responsively apart from two slightly stiff, fingerprint-magnet chrome buttons. The laptop’s speakers produce enough volume to fill a room, albeit with sketchy and scratchy audio.

The spill-resistant keyboard is backlit for confident typing in dim rooms and on red-eye flights (the backlight by default turns off after 15 seconds without pressing a key, though you can switch it to be always on or off). it offers a first-rate layout, with Ctrl and Delete keys in their proper lower-left and top-right corners respectively, and dedicated Home, end, PgUp, and PgDn keys as well as cursor arrows. Its typing feel, alas, is less satisfactory—flat and shallow, with a few keys (notably the space bar and left shift) not always registering during the first hours of use. Slowing down and giving the space bar a sharp rap cured the typos, but I’d still rate the keyboard as inferior to that of the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s ($1,495 list, 4 stars)—or the Toshiba Z835-P330, which showed no space-bar problems in our test.

Features The Z830-S8302 takes a backseat to no ultrabook, however, when it comes to input/output features. sure, others may match its 802.11n Wi-Fi networking and HDMI video port, but the Portege also has good old-fashioned Ethernet and VGA ports, because connecting to wired office LANs and conference-room projectors can still be pretty darn convenient.

Microphone and headphone jacks are on the left, next to the SD card slot that the Lenovo U300s designers forgot. There’s a USB 3.0 port on the right and two USB 2.0 ports, one with Toshiba’s “sleep and charge” functionality for recharging phones and other devices, at the rear. Bluetooth is present, though WiMAX is not. Intel’s Wireless display (WiDi) 2.1, which streams the Portege’s screen to an HDTV set equipped with a third-party (Netgear, Belkin, or D-Link) adapter, is supported, although our test unit arrived without the WiDi software. We downloaded it (135MB) from Intel’s site and configured WiDi with no problems.

Like other ultrabooks, the Z830-S8302 has no optical drive for loading new software, but Toshiba makes up for that with a slew of preloaded software including links to an app store and book store; a scanty 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security; Google Chrome; a Bulletin Board app for arranging notes and other information; and a ReelTime timeline thumbnail view of recently accessed documents and files. The flagship ultrabook is backed by a three-year parts-and-labor warranty.

Considering its price premium over the Z835-P330, you might guess that the Z830-S8302 boasted more storage as well as a faster processor, but you’d be wrong—it’s the same 128GB solid-state drive. That’s nothing to sneeze at, though, as the SSD helped the Toshiba start up in 25 seconds and wake from sleep in just 3 seconds.

Performance The price premium does, however, get you that Core i7 CPU—the same dual-core, four-thread, 1.8GHz Core i7-2677M found in the IdeaPad U300s—as well as 6GB of RAM instead of the usual 4GB. The difference from the Core i3 model is night and day, as the Z830 completed our Adobe Photoshop CS5 test in literally half the time (4 minutes 8 seconds versus 8:17) and pummeled its economical sibling in PCMark 7 (3,366 versus 2,496).

Actually, that PCMark 7 score was narrowly eclipsed by that of the Asus Zenbook UX31 (3,531), but in most of our other benchmarks, the Toshiba topped its rivals (including the same-CPU’d Lenovo) to become the fastest ultrabook we’ve yet tested. The Portege whisked through our Handbrake video encoding run in a tick under 2 minutes, roughly 10 seconds ahead of the Asus and MacBook Air. Its score of 2.32 in CineBench R11.5 was half again as much as the Lenovo’s 1.55. Only its Intel integrated graphics proved predictably inadequate for serious gaming, falling just short of 20 frames per second in both Crysis and Lost Planet 2.

The only test where the high-end Toshiba lost to the value model was our MobileMark 2007 battery rundown, where the Z830-S8302′s more potent components drained the sealed 47Wh battery in 6 hours 27 minutes versus 7:35 for the Z835-P330. still, the deluxe Portege’s time is a virtual tie with the Asus UX31′s 6:32, and longer life than you see with either the MacBook Air or Lenovo U300s.

The ultrabook market is booming. if you’re comparison shopping, $70 more will buy you the Lenovo U300s with a 256GB instead of 128GB SSD; $330 less will buy you the Asus UX31 with a perfectly capable Core i5 and a higher-resolution screen; and of course $630 less will buy you the adequate-for-most-tasks Core i3 Portege. But the Portege Z830-S8302 scores highly in performance, practicality, and sheer sex appeal, though our test unit’s so-so space bar was frustrating.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS: Check out the test scores for the Toshiba Portege Z830-S8302.

COMPARISON TABLE Compare the Toshiba Portege Z830-S8302 with several other laptops side by side.

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Toshiba Portege Z830-S8302