Toshiba Portégé X20W-D

A lesson in why you shouldn’t always judge an ultrabook by its cover.

After casting your eyes and hands over the latest Portégé, we’d forgive you for thinking it was one of Toshiba’s lowend, ‘high-school laptop’-compliant Chromebooks. Apparently ‘premium feel’ was one of the things that had to go with the X20W’s ‘Thinner, Lighter, Faster’ brief. And true, stripping some of the pedigree from the exterior design has meant considerable gains in overall weight and functionality.

It’s encased in an ultralight painted magnesium case that we don’t expect to be good at resisting damage and is largely responsible for giving the unit its cheap plastic feel.

The X20 is a hybrid that feels natural in both laptop and tablet mode. The well balanced stylus, 12.5-inch 1080p touchscreen and sturdy 360º foldable hinge combine to put the X20W up there with the Surface Pro 4 when it comes to slate-mode performance and versatility.

Yes, the keyboard does have small and mushy keys, and the trackpad could do with more surface area and less asymmetrical edges, but both are still functional.

You’ll find the X20W smuggling in a powerful Intel Core i7-7600U, a whopping 16GB of DDR3 RAM and a generous 512GB SSD that’s connected via the absurdly fast PCIe bus. All of which add up to a level of performance that’s almost inexplicable in such a compact package.

All this power does have it’s downsides, though. The battery lasts a middling 3 hours and 38 minutes. The matte screen could also perhaps be a little more vibrant. But really, our main gripes with this one are cosmetic and financial.