Toshiba Kirabook

The Toshiba Kirabook ($1,999.99) is a high-end ultrabook cut from the same cloth as the Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) and the Google ChromeBook Pixel. All three are ultraportable laptops with higher than 1080p HD screens. All three will give you the visual fireworks, though the Kirabook has the lock on thinness and lightness. That said, the Kirabook is really pricey for an ultrabook, and while the screen and other features will wow you, the $2,000 price tag puts a serious damper on things. It's a really nice laptop, but not necessarily $2,000 worth of nice.

Design and Features
The Kirabook is a slim, svelte ultrabook that measures about 0.7 by 12.5 by 8.25 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.77 pounds. This is measurably thicker than the 0.47 inch thick Acer Aspire S7-391-9886 ($1,649), and the Kirabook is imperceptibly lighter than the 2.86-pound Acer S7-391. The Kirabook will fit into most travel bags easily, and with its magnesium alloy exterior and Corning Concore glass screen, you won't have to worry about the occasional drop while it's in that bag.

The top lid has a brushed metal finish, while the bottom lid is matte. The keyboard deck has a matching brushed metal finish to it, with a wide one-piece trackpad ringed by a chrome insert. Toshiba has gone minimal with the Kirabook, since the only visible embellishments are the LED ring around the power button and the adjacent single LED to tell you that Wi-Fi is on. There's a charging indicator LED on the left side of the system as well. The sides of the system house the system's three USB 3.0 ports (two left, one right), HDMI-out port, SD card reader, and headset jack. The USB ports are black instead of the more common blue, but that is OK, since there aren't any USB 2.0 ports to confuse the user. This is where the Kirabook's extra girth comes in handy: you won't need an adapter to use the full sized HDMI port, unlike Micro-HDMI on the slimmer Acer Aspire S7-391. The Acer S7-391also has one less USB port than the Kirabook. The Kirabook has a backlit keyboard. The row of function keys above the numbers default to their more usable functions (e.g., volume, play/FF/REW, etc.) rather than F1-F12, which makes more sense for most users. There are a few keys smaller than standard, like PgUP/PgDN, but on the whole the keyboard is comfortable, even with its slightly shallow keystroke.

The Kirabook's 13.3-inch screen is its centerpiece, coming in at a brilliant 2,560 by 1,440 resolution. This is a claimed 221 pixels per inch (ppi), about the same as the 220-ppi Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display) ($2,199), but a smidge lower than the 239-ppi Google ChromeBook Pixel. The screen looked great when we played 4k QFHD (3,840 by 2,160) videos streamed from the Internet, though it's notable that these videos took quite some time to buffer, even over a 40Mbit FIOS connection. Viewing 1080p streaming videos from Amazon and Netflix looked fine as well, though of course without the eye-popping detail that you'd see in 4k. The strength of the 2,560 by 1,440 display comes into play when you use the system for editing photos and videos, since you can concentrate on large swaths of a 12-megapixel image without having to zoom in too far. You can also edit a 1080p HD video at full resolution even if you surround your workspace screen with a plethora of toolbars. To this end, Toshiba has included a copy of both Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. The Kirabook's screen has 10-point touch, which is a must for a Windows 8 laptop at this price.

Toshiba also includes quite a few other pre-loaded apps, including Skype, Vimeo, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon, eBay, Toshiba Book Place, and Norton Internet Security. The copy of Norton Internet Security is notable because it includes a two-year subscription, which is excellent and almost unheard of today, when 30-60 days is the norm. The Kirabook also includes two years of technical support on a specialized Platinum support plan that promises a direct line to support techs including callback service. The top of the line system we reviewed came with a 256GB SSD, plenty of space for many users. All three configurations of Kirabook come with 256GB of storage, and if you need more, it's easy to hook up a USB 3.0 drive.

There are a few drawbacks to the compact design. Though the touch screen has enough friction to avoid bouncing when you touch it , the sides of the screen have very small bezels. While this makes the system look slimmer than other touch screen systems, it also means that swipes from off screen (like the ones used by the Charm bar) can be awkward. The Kirabook also lacks 802.11ac or 5GHz 802.11 a/n Wi-Fi, being strictly limited to 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n. This isn't a huge deal for most, but if you live in a crowded neighborhood you'd want 5GHz Wi-Fi to cut through your neighbors' wireless routers. While the screen is brilliant, you may have to fiddle with zoom and screen resolution settings on older games and programs: they may not display correctly scaled up to 2,560 by 1,440.

Performance
Performance on the Kirabook was a mixed bag, but mostly good. The Intel Core i7-3537U processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB SSD combined to give us an excellent 5,229 point score on PCMark7, which measures day-to-day performance. This compares well to the non-touch Asus ZenBook UX51Vz-DH71, which came in with a 4,926 point score. The Kirabook was very good, but a bit slower than the quad-core powered Asus UX51Vz-DH71 on the multimedia tests (Handbrake and Photoshop CS6).

The big performance issue for the Kirabook is its lack of discrete graphics. In order to shrink down to ultrabook standards, the Kirabook only has integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000. While HD Graphics 4000 is fine for casual and browser-based games, it can't hold a candle to the Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics in the ZenBook and the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch, both of which are in the same $2,000 price league as the Kirabook. While they may not miss the GPU for its 3D gaming prowess, graphic artists and videographers will prefer to have a GPU helping them out with professional graphics apps like the full CS6 versions of Photoshop and Premiere.

The Kirabook received a passable 5 hours 50 minutes on our battery rundown test. This is an hour better than the Acer S7-391 and two hours better than the Asus UX51Vz-DH71. However, the MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display) and high-end ultraportable Editors' Choice Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) last into the seven-hour range, so the Kirabook is good, but not the best.

And therein lies the problem: The Toshiba Kirabook is really good, but not the best for the money. If you have a need to spend $2,000 on a high-end ultraportable laptop, the Editors' Choice Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) will give you a higher-than-HD resolution screen, dual-band Wi-Fi, full size HDMI, 8GB of memory, 256GB Flash Storage, and similar performance with a Core i5 processor for the same $2,000 price tag. The MacBook Pro also has more battery life and forward-looking I/O ports like Thunderbolt. The Kirabook is lighter, thinner, and comes with the two-year service and support, but those aren't quite enough to unseat the MacBook Pro as the high end ultraportable EC. High-end ultrabooks like the current EC Asus Zenbook Prime Touch UX31A-BHI5T ($1,199) are unfortunately in a totally different price point, and aside from the screen and its lighter weight, the Kirabook doesn't have the bang for the buck that the Asus Zenbook Prime Touch UX31A brings to the table.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Toshiba Kirabook with several other laptops side by side.

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