Toshiba's out to prove that you don't need glitz, glowing innards, or Falcon or Alien designs to make a powerful gaming machine.

The latest addition to the gaming line Toshiba launched last year, the Toshiba Satellite P100-ST9772 ($2,899 direct) is aimed at hard-core gamers who don't fancy the flashy paint jobs or high-end labels and are more concerned about what's inside.

Despite its low-profile design, this machine lets gamers reap the benefits of an nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX, a 2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor and Windows Vista Ultimate.

At first glance, the P100-ST9772 doesn't strike you as a gaming laptop.

The design is no different than those of Toshiba's other consumer-grade laptops, such as the Satellite A135-S4467, which costs under a thousand dollars.

Don't expect any fancy paint jobs or custom tattoos, as on the Voodoo Envy u:909, or the unique strobe lights built into the Dell XPS M1710 (Core 2 Duo).

The P100-ST9772 is as subtle as it gets for a gaming laptop with battery like Toshiba Tecra A7 Battery, Toshiba Tecra A9 Battery, Toshiba Tecra L2 Battery, Toshiba Tecra M1 Battery, Toshiba Tecra M2 Battery, Toshiba Tecra M3 Battery, Toshiba Tecra M4 Battery, Toshiba Tecra M5 Battery, Toshiba Tecra M5L Battery, Toshiba Tecra M6 Battery, Toshiba Tecra M9 Battery, Toshiba Tecra R10 Battery. Its onyx-blue metallic lid is featured in other nongaming Satellite systems as well.

Onyx, a quartz-like rock, bears some resemblance to the metallic finish on the lid, but rarely does it come in navy blue.

Despite the P100-ST9772's no-thrills design, its components may intrigue gamers.

The 17-inch widescreen is absolutely gorgeous. It doesn't have the 1,920-by-1,200 resolution found on the XPS M1710 (Core 2 Duo), but its 1,680-by-1,050 resolution is nothing to laugh about.

The transflective screen's surface resembles a television screen, producing brilliant colors that serve other aspects of multimedia besides gaming, including digital photography, video editing and movie watching.

The keyboard is tactile, as is the case with most Toshiba keyboards. Adjacent to it is a numeric keypad, handy for typing in those pesky gaming serial numbers.

Adding a number pad constricts the direction keys to half their size, so gamers who use these keys to move might find this a little annoying.

Aside from navigation, the touchpad has another purpose: If you tap it lightly, several icons within the touchpad light up to serve as application shortcuts.

Gaming is the P100-ST9772's first agenda, but its media features are well worth noting.

It comes with a DVI-D port, so you can take your gaming experience — digitally — onto a larger display. Of course, you also have analog video-out from your S-Video and VGA-out ports. The four USB ports aren't as impressive as the XPS M1710's six.

I think this system would have made a serious bid for Editors' Choice had Toshiba included an HD DVD drive in the $2,899 price tag. It doesn't have an HD drive as an option, either, unlike the Dell XPS M1710 with its Blu-ray drive.

Everything is neatly tied together by Windows Vista Ultimate. The media center aspect of Vista really brings the 17-inch screen to life. You won't see any lag in Vista given the nature of this system's components.

Along with a powerful dual-core processor (the 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7200), you have 2GB of RAM to offset Vista Ultimate's hefty requirements as well as deliver excellent Photoshop scores. It's safe to say that the components aren't as fast as the ones found in the Dell XPS M1710 (Blu-ray).

Both the 2.33-GHz M1710's Core 2 Duo T7600 CPU and its nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphics chipset are a step above those of the P100-ST9772.

That's not to say that the P100-ST9772 can't hold its own. It obliterates the GeForce Go 7600 found on the MSI Q677 Crystal Edition, and its gaming scores are at least four times as fast.

Today's popular games will run exceptionally well with the P105-ST9772's components. Its nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX won't give you bragging rights above the Dell, but it furnished excellent 3Dmark 2006, "Prey" and "Company of Heroes" 3D gaming scores. In fact, a big chunk of that $2,899 price tag is set aside for the graphics card.

Battery life, as expected, isn't worth writing home about, running down on a DVD in 1 hour 39 minutes.

If you configure both the Toshiba Satellite P100-ST9772 and the gaudier Dell XPS M1710 with similar components, the P100-ST9772 is actually about $200 cheaper.

At the end of the day, gaming is not about impressing your friends with fancy paint jobs or the fastest components.

It's about winning as many virtual death matches as you can, and the P100-ST9772 is up to the task.

Toshiba's new "Thrive" tablet adds laptop-like features, including a USB port, but while that may intrigue formerly-wary tablet buyers, its battery life may deter them from picking one up.

"They've decided to put in laptop-like ports that some people, who have resisted buying a tablet, have been waiting for," Wall Street Journal Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg told FOX Business in his weekly All Things Digital segment.

For the most part, the Toshiba Thrive doesn't look all that different from other Android tablets, Mossberg said. It runs the Honeycomb version of Google's (GOOG: 641.24, -7.17, -1.11%) mobile operating system. It's also bulkier than the iPad, he added.

Where it shines, however, is in the ports Toshiba has given it. There's a full-size USB port that can be used with flash drives, external hard drives, wired keyboards, a camera, or even a mouse, he said.

Further, the device features a full-size HDMI port, great for connecting it to a TV to watch movies, as well as a removable battery such as Toshiba Satellite R15 Battery, Toshiba Satellite U205 Battery, Toshiba Tecra 8000 Battery, Toshiba Tecra 8100 Battery, Toshiba Tecra 9100 Battery, Toshiba Tecra A1 Battery, Toshiba Tecra A2 Battery, Toshiba Tecra A3 Battery, Toshiba Tecra A3X Battery, Toshiba Tecra A4 Battery, Toshiba Tecra A5 Battery, Toshiba Tecra A6 Battery and an SD card slot.

However, Mossberg explains, the tablet falls short in a few areas.

As with all Android tablets at this moment, there is a serious lack of apps optimized for them (as opposed to smartphones), he said.

Finally, the device's battery life, which Mossberg tested to be five and a half hours, pales in comparison to the iPad's 10 hours.

Mind you, we are still pretty much in the prehistoric era of battery-powered projector evolution, but our favorite among the current crop is the Toshiba TDP-FF1AU. Although it is markedly dimmer than the other models and hard to focus, we highly value its compact size, its superior remote control, and its USB input port. And who wouldn’t love its attractively low price?

This tiny projector is about the size of the Boxlight and Mitsubishi models, but its battery has a better design. Instead of sitting below the projector, it attaches to the unit’s rear panel, barely increasing the overall footprint. The battery such as Toshiba PABAS123 Battery, Toshiba PABAS155 Battery, Toshiba PABAS156 Battery, Toshiba PABAS178 Battery, Toshiba PABAS209 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A15 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A20 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A200 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A215 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A30 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A50 Battery, Toshiba Satellite R10 Battery is thus an integral yet detachable part of the device. More important, it is included in the projector’s already low price.

Besides the battery, the TDP-FF1AU comes with a number of other interesting features. It is, for example, the only battery-powered projector to have a lens cap, albeit an easily misplaced one owing to its lack of a tether. Also, it has a USB port rather than an SD Card slot. A VGA cable is included, enabling you to advance slides on your laptop via the remote control. Toshiba even throws in a foldable 23-inch diagonal projection screen.<br>

The key strength of a battery-powered projector is the ability to use it alone, without a laptop. To make this possible, the TDP-FF1AU includes a USB Type A connector, which means you can run a presentation off a USB flash memory drive, or even from certain MP3 players. As with the other pint-size projectors, you must first save your presentation as a series of JPEG files.

Last year, Toshiba made a late-entry into the netbook market. It was a cautious one, too: it’s only offering was the NB205. And yet, this late-comer knocked our socks off, winning our Editors’ Choice award, along with other repeated endorsements from us. So, we were excited to get hands-on with the NB305, the follow-up to this netbook, which Toshiba announced this morning.

Fortunately, Toshiba was hesitant to mess with a good thing: the design is essentially the same, except that the 6-cell battery is more flush with the chassis. Under the hood, this machine has the new Atom N450 processor. The best part is that this system promises up to 11 hours of battery like Toshiba PA3692U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3692U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3727U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3728U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3729U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3729U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3732U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PABAS069 Battery, Toshiba PABAS081 Battery, Toshiba PABAS098 Battery, Toshiba PABAS099 Battery, Toshiba PABAS121 Battery life. The price hasn’t changed either: it’s still $399.

Will Toshiba’s netbook once again be the one to buy? Read on for our early thoughts, and check out our video walk-through.

Everything we loved about the original NB205 still holds true: the sturdy, metal keyboard with well-spaced keys, the large, low-friction trackpad with twin touch buttons that extend all the way to the lower edge of the palm rest, the 10.1-inch LED-backlit display, and the durable, textured lid (although it will no longer be offered in pink). The current list of colors includes blue, brown, and white.

The biggest difference is that the battery is now nearly flush with the system, meaning it’s tucked underneath and doesn’t jut out of the back. The result is that the bottom of the netbook isn’t flat; in profile, you can see that it slants. Although this seems to be mainly a by-product of making the battery flush, Toshiba also claims it makes the design more ergonomic. From our early hands-on, the change is noticeable, but doesn’t seem like it will adversely affect the user experience. We’ll have a better idea once we test it extensively in a full review. Here’s a side-by-side comparison between the NB305 (left) and the NB205 (right).
One last detail: the LED lights on the right side of the palm rest have been raised so that they’re more easily visible (previously, they were on the front side, below the lip).

The NB305 also has slightly beefier specs than its predecessor: a new Intel Atom Pinetrail CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, and Windows 7 Starter Edition. It, too, has a six-cell battery., which Toshiba says lasts up to 11 hours. We can’t comment on battery life until we formally test it, of course, but given the original NB205′s impressive nine-and-a-half-hour battery life, we have great expectations. This time around, it weighs 2.6 pounds (the NB205 was 2.8 pounds).

Given that the NB305 has all but stuck to the NB205′s superlative design and has done nothing but beef up the specs, we expect we’ll love it as much, or more, than the original. Our biggest questions are: will that ergonomic slant be comfortable for long-term use? And how will it compare to other new netbooks, which likely offer the same specs (often for less money) and may (or may not) have stepped up their game when it comes to design? Stay tuned for our full review to find out.

The netbook onslaught of the past 18 months has forced a sea change. No longer is small size alone enough of an excuse for a notebook to carry an exorbitantly high price. With some good performance levels and a great screen, plus light weight and outstanding battery life, the Toshiba Portege A605-P210 could fit the bill for users who need to get real work done on the go with a netbook-size system--and without murdering the bank account.

Toshiba sent us the A605-P210, which has a current MSRP, or list price, of $1399. This midlevel configuration for the A605 packs a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 processor, 3GB of 333MHz DDR2 RAM, a DVD-RW drive, integrated graphics from Intel, and a 300GB hard drive with a 32-bit version of Vista Home Premium. In fact, the hardware isn't all that different from what we saw in Toshiba's Portege R600. But the latter, a higher-end machine, sells for about $700 more, yet scores almost the same as the A605 in performance tests.

Our tests show the A605 to be a decent office performer for an ultraportable, scoring a 69 on PC WorldBench 6, and beating out both the Fujitsu LifeBook T2020 (64) and the Dell Adamo (65), and even the pricier R600 (67). While it fell well below the Macbook Air in this regard (by about 14 percent), it's also several hundred dollars cheaper. Graphics-wise, set your expectations to "meh": At less than 6 frames per second in Unreal Tournament 3 at its lowest settings, don't expect to play decent games here.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the A605 handled multiple applications simultaneously without trouble and even dealt pretty well with high-def video content. The A605's memory footprint and full-fledged Core 2 Duo (versus the Atom processors behind most netbooks) are probably to thank for the snappy user experience. The A605 was generally a pleasure to use, a result aided a lot by the excellent display. The machine impresses in the battery such as Toshiba PA3506U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3534U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3535U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3535U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3591U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3591U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3640U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3640U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3641U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3641U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3689U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3689U-1BRS Battery life category as well, lasting more than 6 hours on a charge. The only ultraportable that did better was the LifeBook T2020, which also weighs and costs more and scored lower on our benchmarks.

The A605's screen is great for both the general office work and the odd media file for which it was intended. With a 1280-by-800 resolution that has enough real estate to get some serious work done, you'll find outstanding brightness and a low-glare screen that remains legible and sharp whether in an office or out and about. While the vertical viewing angle left a little to be desired, the hinge on the A605 only opens so far, and horizontal viewing angles were excellent. Color reproduction was very accurate, and text was quite readable, especially considering the size of the screen.

Small notebooks often feature compromised keyboards, hurting the user experience. Thankfully, that's not the case at all with the A605. The keyboard takes up about half of the laptop's base, and it offered the best typing experience I've found below 14 inches in any notebook. Unlike with its cousin, the R600, the keyboard feels sturdy, with no flex or give. You won't find miniversions of your keys or alternate key layouts like those found on some other ultraportables and netbooks. The touchpad is fine; though smaller than on many full-featured notebooks, it isn't so small that your wrists will ache after a few hours of use.

Apart from gaming graphics, sound is the A605's major failing, which is to be expected in an ultraportable. With just one lonely mono speaker that becomes unlistenable at high volumes (and is too quiet to hear over even moderate levels of ambient noise), the A605 is ill-equipped for media playback even in an office or bedroom situation. The old-fashioned volume dial on the notebook's left side looks dated, but it offers a reasonable level of control. If you're going to use this laptop for media, headphones or dedicated speakers will be a must.

The A605 comes with the standard update notifier and backup software (which works pretty well) and with biometric identification software tied to the fingerprint reader below the touchpad. Otherwise, it has no special software, but what it does have gets the job done. You'll want to dial down the hard disk protection software's sensitivity, which will otherwise steal focus with a popup message if you so much as breath heavily around the A605. The documentation is reasonably thorough and is specific to the A600 line.

The A605's look occupies a strange middle ground in Toshiba's design history. The lid and top panel of the base share the traditional Toshiba high-gloss, piano-black finish, while the lower half of the base has the brushed-metal look of the higher-end Portege notebooks. I'm not a fan of the traditional black finish, which is a fingerprint magnet, but it doesn't look bad, and the keyboard, with the same brushed-metal finish as the base, is easier to use because of its contrast with the rest of the notebook.

This machine isn't for multimedia fiends or gamers. But if you need a small computer than can still handle a lot of office work and open programs at once, and if an optical drive is a necessity, then the A605 will serve you well, with outstanding battery life to boot, at a price well below those of comparably equipped ultraportables.

The 17-inch Satellite P205D-S7479 is on the slow side in office applications and suffers from short battery life, but it gets the daily-grind stuff done and is a pretty fast gamer. If a budget desktop replacement laptop capable of running decent big-screen shoot-'em-ups is on your list, this AMD-powered laptop is a nice choice at $1350 (as of November 16, 2007).

Equipped with a 2.2-GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core TL-64 processor, 2GB of RAM, 256MB of discrete graphics memory, and a 4200-rpm 250GB hard drive, the P205D-S7479 earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 68. That result is 16 percent behind the average score of 81 earned by 19 currently tested desktop replacement laptops, and 13 percent behind the average score of 78 earned by three notebooks with an Intel chip of the same speed (the Fujitsu LifeBook A6110, the HP Compaq 8710p, and the HP Pavilion dv9500t). Though neither gap is huge, the differences do show that the P205D will lag in some applications.

In our gaming tests, the P205D posted marks of 83 and 87 frames per second in Doom 3 and Far Cry, respectively, at 1024 by 768 resolution. Images looked good and played smoothly on the big, bright 1440-by-900-pixel screen; but our test unit, with its 256MB Radeon HD 2600 graphics card, performed just below average for the category. Keep the power adapter handy, regardless, because the battery like Toshiba PA3400U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3420U-1BAC Battery, Toshiba PA3420U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3420U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3421U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3450U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3451U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3457U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3465U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3475U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3476U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3478U-1BRS Battery lasted just 1.6 hours in our tests, 54 minutes shorter than the average battery life of currently tested desktop replacements.

At 7.9 pounds the P205D is a little heavy, but it's nice-looking if you don't mind the big Toshiba logo imprinted on its dark blue lid. The dropped-hinges design gives the rear of the laptop a sleek look. Aside from lacking Bluetooth wireless connectivity, it's also well equipped for the price, including six USB ports. The Del key is buried in the number pad, but otherwise typing is a breeze.

A set of CD and DVD control buttons and integrated Harman/Kardon speakers add to the P205D's attractiveness as an entertainment notebook. The case tends to vibrate a bit when the sound is turned all the way up, and the volume wheel is not very responsive, but those are minor complaints. The audio is rich and full.

It might not blow away the competition, but the Toshiba Satellite P205D-S7479 is fast enough for most types of work, it's well rounded, and it's priced right--and it's your ticket to some inexpensive after-hours gaming fun. There's still a chance that a 14-year-old in Florida with a bigger, meaner gaming rig will be talking smack after blowing you to smithereens, but at least you'll have a nice portable PC for your $1300.

Toshiba is putting tablet makers on notice, saying that it plans to unveil the world's thinnest 10-inch tablet next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced Friday on its Japanese-language website.

The company isn't divulging the make or model of the device, saying only that "the world's thinnest and lightest" 10.1-inch tablet will be part of the Toshiba product lineup at CES. Toshiba will also be bringing along new Ultrabook laptops and LCD televisions, according to a translation of the announcement.

As noted by CNET, the unnamed tablet could simply be one that the company is already selling in Japan for about $800 a pop. That Android 3.2-based tablet, called the Regza AT700, was first unveiled last October at the CEATEC show in Tokyo, where TechRadar got a look at it.

Toshiba's Regza AT700 is 7.7 millimeters thick, about 13 percent slimmer than Apple's iPad 2, which measures in at 8.8 millimeters. It's also slightly lighter than the iPad 2, weighing in at 558 grams as compared with 613 grams for the Apple tablet.

The Regza AT700 sports a 1.2GHz, dual-core chip from Texas Instruments, 1GB of memory, and up to 32GB of onboard storage, plus a microSD slot. The tablet also has a USB 2.0 port and an HDMI port, is rated for up to seven hours of battery Toshiba PA3357U-3BRL Battery, Toshiba PA3382U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3382U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3383U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3383U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3384U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3384U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3395U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3399U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3399U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3399U-2BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3399U-2BRS Battery life, has a front-facing 2-megapixel Webcam and a 5-megapixel camera on the back, and boasts a 1280-by-800 resolution display.

Or perhaps the mystery tablet is something else entirely. It could be something special Toshiba is cooking up for the U.S. market, though it's likely that the device in question is the Excite, a re-branded version of the Regza AT700 that's set to be released in North America this month. Given that Google's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is out of the bag, it could be running that OS rather than Honeycomb.

If you're shopping for an ultrabook, you've got to at least consider Toshiba. Four months after its introduction, the company's Portege Z830/835 remains the lightest in its class at 2.5 pounds (versus 2.9 to 3.3 pounds for most rivals), with the best collection of ports—including Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, and a memory-card reader—that some ultrabooks leave out or delegate to dongles, as does the Dell XPS 13 ($999.99 direct, 4 stars).

We've tested two versions of the Toshiba already, the thrifty but sluggish Intel Core i3-powered Portege Z835-P330 ($799.99 list, 3.5 stars) and the fast but pricey Core i7-based model Z830-S8302 ($1,429 list, 3.5 stars). Now we're looking with like Toshiba PA3307U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3331U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3331U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3356U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3356U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3356U-2BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3356U-2BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3356U-3BAS Battery, Toshiba PA3356U-3BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3357U-1BAL Battery, Toshiba PA3357U-1BRL Battery, Toshiba PA3357U-2BRL Battery at the middle or Core i5 model, the Toshiba Portege Z835-P370 ($1,049.99 list)—and at the risk of sounding Goldilocksian, it's our favorite of the three.
The super-skinny (0.6 by 12.4 by 8.9 inches, HWD) Z835-P370 gets its light weight from a magnesium alloy chassis that makes its base surprisingly sturdy—unlike its vanishingly thin screen, which flirts with the F word (flimsy) if you grasp its corners and wiggle them. In its favor, however, our test unit's screen hinge didn't get the shakes during typing as our Toshiba Z830-S8302's did.

The 13.3-inch display has the same mediocre 1,366 by 768 resolution as every ultrabook we've seen, excepting the 1,600-by-900-pixel Asus Zenbook UX31-RSL8 ($1,049 list, 4 stars) and HP Envy 14 Spectre ($1,399.99 direct, 4 stars). It's nicely bright, with sharp text and colors despite narrowish viewing angles; between the screen and the LED-backlit keyboard, we had no trouble working through a long evening in a less-than-brightly-lit room.

Besides the backlight (which by default turns off after 15 seconds of inactivity, though you can switch it permanently on or off), the keyboard offers an admirable layout, with dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys instead of doubling up these functions on the cursor arrows. We didn't test Toshiba's claim of its spill resistance, but we soon grew accustomed to its firm, somewhat shallow typing feel. Speaking of dedicated, the Toshiba's touchpad has two chrome mouse buttons instead of the mere clicky corners in fashion nowadays; their slightly stiff operation is a contrast to the pad's smooth gliding and tapping.

Features
The Z835-P370 does not have the Intel Smart Connect technology that the HP Envy 14 Spectre and Dell XPS 13 can tap into to update Microsoft Outlook and other Internet applications while the system sleeps (though one of its USB 2.0 ports can charge handheld devices while the system sleeps). But it has other wireless capabilities including Wi-Fi, WiDi or Wireless Display, and Bluetooth.

While the Toshiba ultrabook has no optical drive, we've already mentioned its impressive array of ports. Microphone and headphone jacks and an SD card slot are found on the left side of the chassis, with a USB 3.0 port on the right. Two USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port for modern monitors, and a VGA port for older displays or projectors are at the rear.

The Portege's 128GB solid-state drive has 77GB of free space out of the box, the rest occupied by everything from a system recovery partition to a measly 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security to Google Chrome and a slew of Toshiba-brand utilities. As expected, the SSD makes the little laptop a lot perkier than a hard-drive-based system, booting in 26 seconds and resuming from sleep in 3 seconds by our stopwatch.
The Z835-P370's one-year warranty doesn't stand out from its competitors. Nor does its Intel Core i5-2467M processor, the same 1.6GHz dual-core, four-thread chip found in a handful of popular ultrabooks including the Dell XPS 13 and our Editors' Choice HP Folio 13 ($1,048.99 direct, 4 stars). Its 6GB of standard RAM tops the 4GB usually found in the $1,000-street-price segment, but didn't bring the performance boost we hoped to see in our benchmark tests.

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As the year comes to a close, we've come to the final wave of Ultrabooks for the Holiday season. There are only a handful of decent ones to choose from now.

But the onslaught is coming. Manufacturers are expected to unveil more than 50 new Ultrabook models at CES in January.

For now, the choice is simple when it comes to super-thin laptops. First, there's the MacBook Air, which has seen such massive success that everyone else is rushing to copy it. Then, you have the Windows-powered wannabes.

The Toshiba Portege is the third Ultrabook I've tested to date (not counting my MacBook Air.) It's definitely one of the best, and comes at a cost-friendly starting price of $800 if you get it at Best Buy. Keep reading for the full review.

Just like Toshiba did with its Thrive tablet, it packed full-sized ports into the Portege. While that strategy was a complete disaster on the Thrive, it works like a dream on the Portege. It has it all: Three USB ports, HDMI out, SD card, and even a Ethernet port in case you need a wired connection.

I'm amazed Toshiba was able to pack all that into such a slim profile. My only criticism is that the Ethernet port bulges out a bit, ruining the continuity in the Portege's design. I would've gladly sacrificed the port to avoid that.

There are a bunch of configurations for the Portege, with more coming, but the model I tested had a 1.4 GHz Intel i3 processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB solid state drive. The hefty RAM helps a lot with speed, but it's the solid state drive that makes the Portege (and other Ultrabooks) fly.

In my tests, the Portege would boot up between 15 and 20 seconds. That's pretty much the same speed as the MacBook Air, and very impressive for a Windows 7 machine. When you wake the Portege from sleep mode by opening the screen, it flips on almost immediately. Even the Wi-Fi connects almost immediately, which is refreshing.

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I also enjoyed Toshiba's new cooling system. It sucks air in instead of pushing it out, creating a nearly noiseless flow. The bottom still gets a little toasty on your lap, but it's not that bad.

The trackpad wasn't as responsive as I'm used to on my MacBook Air. Two-finger scrolling works better than on the Acer Aspire, but I still don't feel that perfect 1:1 movement that I do on the MacBook.

I can see how the Portege's design wouldn't appeal to everyone. The design is less inviting than the MacBook Air–full of angles and adorned in a gunmetal grey casing. It almost has a corporate-y look to it. Personally, I kind of like it.

I also love how light the Portege is. It weighs just 2.47 pounds (which varies depending on configuration), yet it doesn't feel cheap and plasticky. Toshiba claims to have a fancy "honeycomb rib structure" to keep the casing stable. Marketing terms aside, all you need to know is there aren't any bends and creaks. Even my MacBook Air gets a little creaky sometimes.

I also enjoyed the screen size of the Portege. I think 13-inch screens are the sweet spot for notebook computers, since it allows for a full-sized keyboard and plenty of space to get stuff done on a desk top.

I was mostly okay with the keyboard layout save for the Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End buttons lined up in a vertical row on the far right side. I found myself accidentally hitting the "End" key a lot, which is bad news when you're writing a long sentence.