Toshiba’s Portégé Z20t convertible is designed to take on heavyweight offerings like the Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 and Lenovo’s Yoga line. It’s targeted at business users, and offers a premium, fanless design and extensive battery life.
From budget tablets to high-end notebooks, there’s a huge variety of hardware form factors available to Windows users in 2015. Toshiba latest offering sits in the most versatile category of the lot, offering both tablet and laptop functionality.
Open up the new Portégé Z20t convertible and you’ll find a 12.5-inch 1,920 x 1,080 display, equating to 176 pixels per inch (PPI). That’s not quite as pixel dense as the 12-inch Surface Pro 3’s 216 PPI, but should be sharp enough for most users. It’s also an IPS panel, meaning viewing angles should be solid.
One of the most important stats on any portable machine is its running time. This is an area where the Z20t shines, with Toshiba quoting 9.1 hours battery life in tablet mode and an impressive 17.4 hours when docked with the keyboard. The hybrid’s power-sipping Intel Core M processor plays a big part in this, and also allows for a silent, fanless design.
Aside from supporting up to 10 simultaneous touch points, the Portégé offers Wacom digitizer pen input, with 2,048 points of sensitivity. The optional detachable keyboard is both LED backlit and spill-resistant, though it does make the system a good deal heavier – more than doubling the standalone tablet weight of 1.6 lb (0.73 kg) to 3.3 lb (1.5 kg).
The Windows convertible features a black magnesium alloy finish, and offers a choice of either 128 or 256 GB SSD storage, paired with 4 or 8 GB of memory. There’s the latest 802.11ac wireless onboard, as well as Bluetooth 4.0. The tablet itself features microHDMI, microUSB and microSD ports, while the dock increases connectivity with a full-size RGB, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet and two USB 3.0 ports.
Like any good hybrid, the Z20t is capable of both tablet and laptop functionality, but the hinge is also reversible, allowing the keyboard to act as a stand, making it a good fit for small presentations.
The system will be available this month, with prices starting at US$1,399. It will also be sold as a standalone tablet without the keyboard dock and digitizer stylus for $899 starting February.
Source: Toshiba
