Design
The Portege R835-P88 has a rather spartan look. It has blue magnesium alloy casing. Horizontal striations along the lid offer a slight flourish along with the chrome Toshiba logo in the center.
The R835′s interior is made of black magnesium alloy. A fairly large keyboard sits in a recessed portion of the deck. A black chrome power button, two small square speakers, the Eco Utility button and Intel Wireless Display button sit above the keyboard. Other design highlights include chrome hinges and mouse buttons, along with a myriad of status lights below the touchpad.
Weight: 3.2 pounds.
Dimensions: Portege R835-P88 is a bit thick at 12.4 x 8.9 x 0.7/1.1-inches.
Keyboard and Touchpad
Since the R835′s spill-resistant keyboard sits between the battery and the large touchpad, the keys are more squashed than on other keyboards. It’s not that big of a deal with most of the keys, but the space bar, Enter, and Shift keys felt somewhat unsubstantial. Typing as a whole wasn’t the most pleasant experience; the keys felt squashy and lack backlighting.
It has spacious 3.26 x 2-inch Synaptic touchpad. Fingers glided effortlessly over the matte black surface. Multitouch gestures such as pinch-zoom, two-finger scroll and rotate and three-finger press and rotate were quick and accurate.
Display and Audio:
At 170 lux, the Toshiba Portege R835′s 13.3-inch 1366 x 768p display isn’t the brightest. However, the glossy display delivered deep vibrant color. Don’t underestimate the R835-P55′s pair of diminutive speakers. They easily filled small testing room with loud, clear audio.
Ports
The right side of the R835 features a USB 3.0 port, a tray-loading DVD drive, Gigabit Ethernet and jacks for headphones and a microphone. A security lock slot sits in the right chrome hinge while a 3-in-1 card reader sits directly above the optical drive. A USB 2.0 port, an eSATA/USB 2.0 port with Sleep-and-Charge capability, HDMI, VGA and a power jack reside on the notebook’s left.
Webcam and Face Recognition:
The R835′s webcam captures stills and video in 1280 x 720 with the Toshiba Web Camera Application. Toshiba also includes its Face Recognition utility. Quick and fairly easy to set up, it took only 2 minutes for the software to scan our faces and register our image. From there, it took the system 5 seconds to scan our face and unlock the notebook during start up.
toshiba-portege-r835-p88
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Speculations:
- 2.5-GHz Intel Core i5-2450M CPU
- 6 GB of RAM, 640GB
- 5,400-rpm hard drive
- Mobile Intel HD Graphics
- 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.
Graphics Performance:
Portege R835-P88 delivered a frame rate of 37 fps on Good at 1366 x 768, slightly above the 33 fps category average.
Battery Life:
Toshiba Portege R835-P88 lasted 7 hours and 35 minutes. (continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi)