AllThingsD » Portege

MacBook Air Rises to Top of Consumer Reports Ratings

John Paczkowski — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:48:54 +0000

More good press for the MacBook Air. Consumer Reports updated its computer ratings earlier this week to include the machine, and while it had some criticisms, it ranked the 11-inch Air and its 13-inch sibling at the top of their respective categories and gave both machines a “recommended” rating. (Sorry, full rating access is for subscribers only.)

The 11-inch Air scored 67 points out of 100, well above its closest rival, the Toshiba Satellite, which scored a 51. Meanwhile the 13-inch model scored 78 points out of 100, two points better than the Toshiba Portege. The publication found the Airs’ performance, displays and ergonomics to be their stand-out features, but wasn’t quite as impressed by the speakers on the 11-inch model and the versatility of both, which it rated as “fair.”

And then, of course, there is the issue of price. Both Airs exceeded their closest rivals on that front as well. At $1,300, the 13-inch Air is $520 more than the Portege, and at $1,000, the 11-inch is approximately double the price of the Satellite. ’Course, the Satellite also weighs over a pound more and pales in the performance, ergonomics and display categories, so there are obvious trade-offs here.

In any event, a good showing for Apple. If the Air truly is the future of the MacBook, as Steve Jobs claims, Apple has a lot to look forward to.

New Laptop From Toshiba Is Lightweight and Speedy

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:03:45 +0000

For all the excitement about tablet computers, the traditional clamshell laptop still rules. In fact, the computer industry is working hard to make it smaller, lighter and sleeker.

[ See post to watch video ]

There have been two broad approaches to this task. One, exemplified by netbooks, has been to shrink the footprint of the machine, so it’s lighter and cheaper. But this has meant cramped keyboards and screens, and generally wimpier processors and battery life.

The other, pioneered by the MacBook Air and the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 series, has been to preserve a standard 13-inch screen, a roomy keyboard, and standard processors for decent performance, but to pare thickness and weight. But this has meant much higher prices.

Now Toshiba, long known for making thin, light, laptops, has introduced a standard-footprint machine that is thin and light—and uses the latest Intel processors, with generous memory and storage, and strong battery life. Yet it costs much less than the MacBook Air and X300, with the tradeoff being a bit more bulk. I’ve been testing this model, which is called the Portege R705. Despite a few drawbacks, I like the R705 and can recommend it to consumers willing to pay higher-than-netbook prices for a speedy, standard-size, but easy-to-tote laptop with good battery life.

Toshiba’s Portege R705, which is just over an inch thick, has a roomy keyboard with generously sized keys.

The R705 is the sole consumer model in a new R700 line mainly aimed at corporate customers. Toshiba sells it online for $890, while Best Buy’s site has it at $800. That is about double the price of a top-of-the line netbook, but the R705 is much more powerful than a netbook and is much cheaper than the MacBook Air, which currently starts at $1,500, or the ThinkPad X301 (the latest in the X300 series), which starts at over $2,000.

This new Toshiba has a dark-blue cover and a solid construction, despite feeling very light in the hand. The bright, vivid screen is sturdy, and the roomy, well-spaced keyboard is firm, with a large space bar, delete key, tab, backspace, shift and arrow keys. The touchpad and buttons also are generously sized.

The R705 is thicker than the MacBook Air, at just over an inch thick versus about three-quarters of an inch for the Apple. It’s also thicker than the ThinkPad in some places and thinner in others. At three pounds, it’s about the same weight as the Apple, though it’s slightly lighter than the ThinkPad. Unlike the Apple and like the ThinkPad, the new Toshiba has a built-in DVD drive.

It has a much better selection of ports than the Apple, including three USB ports instead of one. It also has three ports missing entirely on the Apple: a built-in Ethernet port; an HDMI port for direct, high-definition connection to a TV; and a memory-card reader. (The ThinkPad has three USB ports and an Ethernet jack, but no memory reader or HDMI.)

The new Toshiba sports a big 500 gigabyte hard disk and 4 gigabytes of memory to power its 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium. The Apple and Lenovo have just 2 gigabytes of memory and a maximum storage capacity of 128 gigabytes, though both offer solid-state drives versus the standard mechanical hard disk on the Toshiba.

The R705 also has better battery life than the MacBook Air or ThinkPad X300 series. In my tough battery test, where I disable all power-saving features, crank the screen to full brightness, leave on the Wi-Fi and play a continuous loop of music, the R705 got four hours and 29 minutes of battery life. The MacBook Air racked up three hours and 24 minutes in my test, and the X300 just three hours and five minutes.

I estimate that in more-normal use, the R705 could last 5½ hours on a single charge—an impressive figure, though short of the company’s eight-hour claim. There is an Eco button, which switches the machine into a low-power mode to get more battery life.

In my tests, the new Toshiba speedily handled common software, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, Apple’s iTunes, and the Firefox and Chrome Web browsers.

The Toshiba has some other benefits. It uses the latest Intel Core processor—albeit the lowest-end version—and incorporates an Intel technology called Wi-Di which wirelessly beams whatever is on its screen to a TV, via a $100 adapter. It also has a couple of nice Toshiba software utilities, including a handy Bulletin Board program for organizing files and another called ReelTime, which lets you quickly find recently used files by date.

So what about the drawbacks? Well, for one, it has a relatively low-end integrated graphics chip. It stuttered repeatedly while streaming high-definition video from the Web, even on a very fast Internet connection. I found scrolling on the touchpad to be a bit jerky. And its start-up and restart times were relatively slow, approaching two minutes. Also, the R705 lacks Bluetooth connectivity. Finally, it includes an obnoxious, prominent “craplet” program from Best Buy that’s basically an ad.

Still, overall, this is a very nice laptop whose light, thin body hides a pretty powerful computer.

Find Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Solid-State Drives Challenge Hard Drives in Speed, but Not Value

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:01:00 +0000

The hard-disk drive is so common that most computer users take it for granted as a natural part of a personal computer. But now, the hard drive has a challenger for its longtime role as the principal storage device in computers. It’s called the solid-state drive, or SSD, and it has begun to show up in some big-name notebook computers.

Hard-disk drives, or HDDs, are mechanical devices. They work by recording data on a spinning magnetic platter or platters. By contrast, solid-state drives are made of chips and have no moving parts. They are close cousins to the so-called flash memory used in digital cameras, cellphones and smaller-capacity music players. They record data to special memory chips that retain their contents even when the device is turned off.

[ See post to watch video ]

Solid-state drives have some key advantages. Because they lack moving parts, they are faster, draw less power, are harder to damage and are quieter than hard drives. Unfortunately, today’s early versions of SSDs for laptops also have two big drawbacks when compared with hard drives: They offer much lower capacity and have much higher prices.

For instance, on the newly announced Apple MacBook Air ultrathin laptop, the HDD version costs $1,799 and stores 80 gigabytes. The SSD version costs $2,798, but actually stores less — just 64 gigabytes. On the Toshiba Portege R500 subnotebook, the basic hard-drive version costs $1,999 and stores 120 gigabytes. The cheapest SSD version is $2,699 and also stores just 64 gigabytes.

Despite these limitations, I believe SSDs are likely to become more common and more popular as their capacities increase and their prices drop. Samsung, which makes the 64-gigabyte SSDs in both the Apple and the Toshiba, has already announced an SSD with twice the capacity that costs much less per gigabyte of storage.

I’ve been testing the SSD models of the Portege R500 and the MacBook Air to see how they measure up to their HDD counterparts. My verdict is that the SSD does deliver on its promises, but, in some cases, just barely.

For the small slice of users who are deeply and constantly worried about hard-disk failures, it may be worth it to pay a huge premium today for an SSD that stores less. Because SSDs aren’t subject to mechanical failures, your data are probably safer on them. But for mainstream users, my conclusion is that it’s too early to take the plunge on SSDs, and the best strategy is to wait for prices to drop sharply and for capacity to rise.

In my tests, I focused solely on comparing the hard-drive and SSD models of each machine, which I had had already reviewed in earlier columns. On the same computer, I wondered, would the SSD make a significant difference in speed and in battery life?

To measure battery life, I conducted my usual harsh test, where I turn off all power-saving software, set screen brightness to maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music.

In this test, the SSD made little difference in the MacBook Air and, in fairness, Apple is making no claims of any significant battery-life gains on its SSD model. The SSD MacBook gave me just five more minutes of battery life. Apple says this is because its hard-drive model already uses a very low-power drive.

On the Portege R500, my first battery test with the SSD model actually yielded significantly less battery life than the hard-drive model. The reason: Toshiba ships the base SSD model with a battery with only half of the capacity of the hard-drive model.

When I swapped in the normal battery, which costs $117 extra, the SSD model gave me an added 1 hour and 21 minutes of battery life, about a 36% increase. That extra battery life likely would translate to nearly 2½ hours in more normal usage. It may be worth the huge price premium for some folks.

On both computers, the SSD was faster than the HDD models. The SSD version of the Apple booted up from a cold start, and rebooted with several programs running, about 40% faster. But the gain isn’t as impressive as it seems because even the hard-drive versions of the MacBook Air booted up in under a minute and rebooted in just a little over a minute.

On the Toshiba, which was running Windows XP, the SSD model knocked about 40 seconds off a cold boot time on the HDD version of 2 minutes and 7 seconds. On my reboot test, starting with several programs running, the SSD model was 80 seconds faster. I imagine that on laptops with the slow-booting Windows Vista, the improvements might be more meaningful.

I also tested launching Microsoft Word and Excel, and opening a couple of hefty PDF files on both machines. The SSD versions were faster. But in most cases, the gains were just a few seconds or even fractions of a second.

All in all, the SSD is a promising improvement over the hard drive, but now is not the time for most users to buy it.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.