For years the Portege series has been Toshiba's top-of-the-line ultraportable brand, featuring the latest CPUs while usually setting the standard for portability, and always been attached to seriously hefty price tags.

Toshiba's put out a 3.2-pound, Core i3-powered notebook that's less than half the price of former Porteges. It has an optical drive, 500GB of HDD storage, Intel's wireless display technology and app. 8.5 hours of battery life. The R705 has a chiclet keyboard. The black keys are a lot like those on Toshiba's Mini NB305 netbook in terms of their Technia font, and they're also quite small. The plastic touchpad is decently sized and comfortable for pushing around the cursor. The pad does support multitouch gestures, two-finger scrolling failed more often than not, while pinch-to-zoom worked fine and the right side doesn't function as a scroll strip.

Conclusion:

If you're looking for a thin and light 13-inch laptop under $900, the R705 beats all the others on the market.

Battery Life:

Toshiba's promised 8.5 hours of battery life seemed quite unrealistic to the reviewers, and in reality it was actually about half of that.

More Specs:

This laptop has a 2.26GHz Core i3-350M and 4GB of RAM. Watching a DVD with those programs open in the background was also a breeze. This unit had a 500GB hard drive with Windows 7 Home Premium. The R705 relies on Intel's integrated HD graphics, the integrated option was fine for playing back high-def YouTube videos and regular flash video on Hulu and Amazon.

Compared to:

• Toshiba Portege R705
• Acer TimelineX 4820T
• Dell Vostro V13
• Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 13
• ASUS U30Jc
• ASUS UL50Vf

Display:

The 13.3-inch, 1366x768-resolution display is glossy, but far less glossy than those we've seen on laptops lately, it's actually got the perfect amount of gloss for a laptop like this, not to mention it's plenty bright and colors appeared quite crisp. Still, the viewing angles are disapp