Toshiba Kirabook review: Toshiba tries to reinvent itself with a flagship Ultrabook

-
Toshiba Kirabook review Toshiba tries to reinvent itself with a flagship Ultrabook


It's not like Toshiba is new to laptops -- it's been making them for decades -- but for whatever reason, US consumers don't seem to trust the company with top-shelf products. Four-hundred-dollar machines, maybe, but a designer laptop? An Ultrabook, no less? Toshiba has an image problem, to be sure, and the executives in Tokyo know it. The answer, they hope, is to start fresh with a clean slate. The company recently announced a new family of premium devices, called Kira, with the 13-inch Kirabook being the inaugural product.

At first blush, it has all the trappings of a flagship machine, with an all-metal chassis, backlit keyboard, 8GB of RAM, a two-year warranty and a 2,560 x 1,440 display, one sharp enough to rival the Chromebook Pixel and Retina display MacBook Pro. In fact, this is the first Windows laptop to offer such a high-resolution panel, which gives Toshiba a big opportunity indeed: to lure people who still haven't found their perfect Ultrabook. The problem with "perfect," of course, is that it comes at a price: $1,600 and up, in this case, and the touchscreen isn't even standard. That leaves just one question, then: is it worth it?

Filed under:
Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Virus-based sensors find superbugs in minutes, may lead to safer surfaces

-
Image
Viruses usually have to be rendered inert to work in humanity's favor, as anyone who has received a flu shot can attest. Auburn University has bucked that trend by discovering a way to put active viruses to work in not only diagnosing sickness, but in preventing it in the first place. It's using bacteria-hating (and thankfully harmless) viruses as biosensors to quickly identify superbugs, or antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can sometimes prove fatal. As the viruses change color once they've reached impervious bacterial strains, in this case variants on Staphylococcus, they can reveal superbugs within 10 to 12 minutes -- a potentially lifesaving interval when current purification-driven methods can take hours. Auburn would like to eventually use what it has learned to develop more effective antibacterial glass and similar surfaces. If successfully put into practice, either breakthrough could mitigate what's already a major medical crisis. [Image credit: Bob Blaylo
Read more

Asus Padfone with Tegra 3 coming in early 2012

-
Image
Just as we were settling down to another calm and banterful Engadget Mobile Podcast, our special guest had to go and throw us some hard news. Yup, and rather than making you sit through the entire two-hour recording (pleasant as that would be), we're just going to come right out with it: Nicole Scott from netbooknews.com has it on good authority that the Asus Padfone will be coming out at MWC 2012 in February. What's more, it won't be powered by a Qualcomm Krait S4 as suggested by that strange GLBenchmark we saw earlier -- it will in fact sport a Tegra 3, just like its highly capable big bro the Transformer Prime . See? That's the kind of juicy reward our podcast listeners get for tuning in each week. Asus Padfone with Tegra 3 coming in early 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds .
Read more