KIRAbook – a pretty good Ultrabook
Beautiful to look at, incredibly easy to use, much more than I anticipated – even
beyond the already great experiences I’ve had with Toshiba products.
Instant on – works as advertised, the SSD makes a difference; if you buy a laptop make
sure it has this type of drive. My KIRAbook has a 256GB SSD, leaving plenty of
space for storage.
Screen graphics – awesome at extreme angles for tight viewing on a plane, great color, definition and contrast. Videos and movies look great.
Weight – just a tab heavier than my Portege, but better components are
packaged in, thus keeping it cooler, and making it run faster. Toshiba finally got
smart and put higher quality and larger rubber feet on the bottom, to keep it from
sliding off your desk. In previous laptops they came off after about two weeks of usage.
Speed – I’m on the road often and use my cellphone’s 4G
capability. It runs equally as fast as when I’m at home with my router. No
latency with YouTube vids or Vimeo presentations.
A couple of minor issues, and one major one.
The touchpad scroll capability needed to be enabled as it wasn’t working upon
delivery. Not being totally comfortable with W8, I had to poke around to figure
out how to get to settings then the control panel to turn on scrolling. I
learned subsequently the much easier W8 way to manage devices. The other issue
is not one of the laptop in particular. Because the screen resolution of the
KIRAbook is so high it creates a full screen with such tiny text that when using
Remote Desktop (to access remote networks) it is very difficult to work
effectively.
A major issue is the lack of a VGA connector. If you do presentations or work with a large screen monitor, this laptop will not work with either. It has a HDMI-Out, but how many external projectors, and large monitors have HDMI cable connectors – very few.
All in all incredible laptop value for what will be perceived an
elevated price.
Awesome Customer Service Experience
The Amazon partner I purchased my KIRAbook through, ElectroNick, deserves a huge shout out. The product was late by a day in getting to my home, which created some delays with my work project. They threw in a copy of Office 2013 Pro for the trouble (a $400 value) – that was service beyond expected. I highly recommend them.
-Reed Oftain