ONE-TIME market leader Toshiba is on the comeback trail in the notebook and tablet arena and its Portege Z10t is an attempt to nail the tricky hybrid tablet/ultrabook zone.
The hybrid attempts to straddle the best of both worlds by combining a Windows 8 powered tablet with some form of detachable keyboard or a screen that rotates to form a tablet.
It's tricky to get a hybrid right and maintain the balance of low weight and portability with a decent typing experience.
Toshiba's Z10t takes a middling approach to the hybrid theme, with a keyboard cum docking station that clips on to the 11.6-inch screen tablet portion of the device.
The clip-on keyboard with its chiclet-style keys is a pretty good typing platform.
It has an excellent touch pad and there's even a thumbstick in the centre of the keyboard.
When docked, the Z10t's weight goes from 825g in tablet mode to 1.43kg, but the keyboard adds a handy range of extra ports including HDMI out, a VGA connector, Gigabit Ethernet and a USB 2.0 port to complement the USB 3.0 port on the tablet body. A sturdy hinge holds the tablet to the dock and herein lies the gadget's main weakness.
When docked, the screen sits at almost 90 degrees to the desktop meaning you are peering down on to it and not getting the best of a very good display. When I first set up the machine, I couldn't believe Toshiba had so limited the viewing angle and I almost broke the hinge trying to bend it back to a better angle.
The 11.6 inch in-plane-switching, touchscreen display is a beauty with 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution and crisp, clean colour.
We tested the upmarket Z10t with a 1.5Ghz Intel Core i5 processor (there's a Celeron-powered model as well), 4GB of main memory and a 128GB solid state drive. There's a 4G modem as well for internet access.
Navigating around Windows 8 was fast and fluid and the Z10 returned Cinebench scores of 10.95 frames per second and 1.81 points on the render test.
Battery life was about five hours when running a movie with the screen at full bright.
