Toshiba debuts thin+light 'ultrabook' Satellite Z830

By David Flynn, October 21 2011

Toshiba will join the ultrabook brigade next month with the Australian release of the Satellite Z830.

The Japanese colossus of mobile computing has had many waif-thin welterweight notebooks before, of course, but this is its first entry Intel's new ultrabook category.

(If you want a recap: the ultrabook recipe calls for a profile under 2cm, weight less than 1.4kg, an SSD drive, instant-on from sleep mode, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 ports and four to six hours battery life.)

The Satellite Z830 certainly ticks all those boxes, and then some.

It nudges the scales at 1.12kg, which Toshiba claims makes this the world’s lightest 13.3” ultrabook; and at 1.6cm around the waist it's definitely got the 'thin and light' bit nailed.

It's also an undoubtedly slick bit of kit, with a sleek magnesium-cladding finish on the outside married to an internal honeycomb structure for maximum strength and durability against the knocks, drops, spills and tumbles of life on the road.

In a similar vein, the backlit keyboard is spill-resistant.

Now to look at the Satellite Z830 front the front or side-on you'd think this must be a bit sparse on connectivity, and that's always a prime concern of business travellers.

But not so, fellow frequent flyers.

While the left side of the notebook (above) sports just the mandatory audio jacks and an SD card slot, the rear is bristling with jacks.

Counting off from left to right: Ethernet, so you're not reliant on the inbuilt wi-fi for hooking up to the Internet; two USB 2.0 ports (with a high-speed USB 3.0 port on the right side of the notebook); plus full-size HDMI and VGA ports, rather than mini-versions which call for special adaptors.

The starting price will be $1,399 but Toshiba's still coy on the rest of the specs, alas: we don't know how fast the base-level processor is, or even if this is an Intel Core i3 or i5; nor have they declared how much you'll pay for faster versions of the chips, or similar upgrades (if available) to the standard 128GB SSD.

Nor does the press release make any mention of inbuilt 3G, standard or otherwise. So stay tuned for more details...