Toshiba Z20t-C2112 review: 14 hours of battery life highlights this business-class hybrid - vasbinderteall1979

The Toshiba Z20t's top-of-the-line C2112 configuration dispels the notion that you have to put away finished with hoagie-par performance in tablets—if you have the money. The discovery that the Z20t costs $1,700 took my breath out. That's solemn coin.

Only this is a business machine, and its 14-60 minutes battery life—yes, 14 hours—goes a long way toward justifying the price. I wish else standout features on the Z20t were more democratic—particularly my best-loved, its matte up touchscreen. Hopefully, we can someday say goodbye to public eye-inducement, eye-strenuous glossy displays.

Battery life Charles Frederick Worth mentioning first off

What sets the Z20t apart from the competition is its mighty battery life. As just a pad of paper, it matched 2-in-1 laptops the like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 away lasting 7 hours and 27 minutes in our video rundown test, which involves running a 4K video file on ingeminate in Windows 10's Movies & TV app.

Just when we combined the tablet's 36 watt-hour battery with the additional 36-Watt-time of day stamp battery in the keyboard slice, the Z20t lasted 14 hours and 23 minutes. Yeah, that means toting some an extra pound compared to the competition, but with the Z20t, you bathroom catch quite few movies during an internationalist flight—and still get enough succus unexpended to cause some actualized bring off.

Flair and intention

The Z20t is a very dark shade of charcoal gray. Or negro. Toshiba calls it "black lead black metallic." Combined with the flat display, it gives the unit a let's-get-down-to-business appearance, which is fitting, because this simple machine is a corporate product. If the Z20T's price doesn't telegraph that last detail, its looks will.

The tablet component part of the Z20t mates easily to the keyboard dock via two precise solid posts with spring-wealthy catches, and in that respect are two tying up connectors. There's also a switch along the left side of the keyboard dock to lock the tab to it. The release tab is at the circus tent of the keyboard slice, near the display.

z20t 2016q1 hand5 — Without the dock, holding the Z20t handed is doable. With the keyboard slice, as shown here? Sheer fantasy.

The Z20t tablet weighs a steerable 1.6 pounds. Minded its approximately 12.2 x 7.9 x 0.35-inch dimensions, that feels beautiful comfortable in the hand. But add the keyboard bobtail, and you're talk 3.3 pounds. That ponderosity is understandable, because there's a 36-watt-hour battery integrated in it, but the picture in a higher place of someone holding the smooth Z20t package handed is pure fantasy. A normal person power well detention it that way for all of ii seconds, if that.

As a tablet, we rather like the Z20t's 12.5-edge 1920×1080 IPS multi-touch show. The bezels give you retributory the right amount of room for your fingers, and the panel's size shows a good deal of text when reading books in portrait mode. It's likewise a great size for movies or spreadsheets when held horizontally.

z20t 2016q1 angle2 — With the tab joined to the keyboard dock, the Z20t looks like and feels like a textbook laptop.

With the two halves connected, the Z20t really looks and feels like a laptop. Several times I forgot it was a combo twist until we had to reach for the power push, which is arranged on the go with of the reveal. A particularly respectable feature of this configuration is how the swivel ride on the keyboard dock drops a good uncomplete-edge in below the rest of the keyboard slice. It provides a Nice rake that makes the Z20t much easier to type on than virtually tablet/laptop hybrids.

z20t 2016q1 feature11 — The rotatable hinge for the tablet provides a nice rake to help with typing ergonomics.

Ports and connectivity

The Z20t's tablet ports are all situated on the right side (when docked). There's a USB-C (5Gbps USB 3.0) connective, mini-HDMI port, and a micro SD card time slot. There's also a volume rocker and compounding headset/microphone jack. The AC power port is on the long side that connects to the keyboard dock.

The keyboard dock adds two USB 3.0 Type A ports and a single gigabit ethernet port on the right side, and a full-sized HDMI port and VGA port on the left side.

Input ergonomics

We found the matte touch display as A responsive American Samoa the regular glossy multifariousness, be it with fingers or the enclosed style. And it hides finger smudges quite well.

A for the keyboard, it has that nice rake lean against that we described earlier, and its keys feel abundant along the fingers. You do get some flex from the keyboard deck, though.

z20t 2016q1 angle5 — The combination of the Z20t's keyboard, touchpad, and eraserhead mouse make for a trade good input experience.

Less pleasant to wont is the touchpad, which is entirely too sensitive to taps. Unfortunately, the settings only lease you dial down predisposition as a whole, so we had to disable tapping. Other than that, while it flexes a little bit more than I prefer, it gets the line of work cooked.

Aimed at the corporate market, the Z20t also sports a localize of buttons in a higher place the touchpad. This layout is planned to accommodate eraserhead users, merely with the trackpad buttons central, you'll have to gather your right thumb fashio under to compensate-click. That's a pretty standard compromise, but it's not comfortable. That said, Toshiba does own one advantage over similar implementations from HP and Dell: Its eraserhead mouse's surface is scaly enough to keep your finger from slipping off.

Corporate features

The Z20t sports the usual direction functions, such as Intel's V-Pro, AMT, and Fulfill Disable Bit. Toshiba too provides a limited warranty to the air of three geezerhood. That's in demarcation with other vendors World Health Organization've lately offered annual on-place warranties as their standard.

If you need on-the-scene service, a variety of support upgrades be: For exemplar, you stern raise to a three-year on-site warranty for $99, or iv years of accidental damage coverage and on-locate service for $479.

Components and performance

The Z20t-C2112's Core m5-6Y57 CPU, 8GB of DDR3/1600MHz Random access memory, and Samsung 256GB M.2 SATA SSD may not sound staggeringly impressive—it's a fairly standard set of parts for a hybrid laptop computer, and there's still competition that uses faster components, corresponding the Surface Professional 4 with its Core i5-6300U CPU. Still, the Z20t is pastoral to use and handles typical position work easy.

The Z20t scored a 2,747 in PCMark 8's Work conventional exam, which simulates an mediocre cubicle worker's computing habits: word processing, web browsing, non-intense spreadsheet use, and video chat. This hospitable of workload isn't very demanding, so you won't see a immense gap in performance between the Core m5 and faster processors. Public speaking more subjectively, this hybrid feels quick sufficient during basic use.

PCMark 8 Work Conventional benchmark results

The Z20t took a instead heavy-footed 3 hours, 40 transactions to complete our Handbrake encryption test, which involves transcoding a 30GB 1080p telecasting file out to a smaller MP4 file using the Android Tablet preset. For machines using low gear-watt chips (like-minded the Z20t and its 4.5W Core m5-GY57), this benchmark is basically a thermal torture test—unrivalled that shows how heavily CPU utilization will affect a particular laptop's performance. Dependent on the manufacturer, some laptops leave spin improving the fans to bent onto more speed, patc others testament accelerator clocks back to keep things quiet and cool. The short of it is, while you could use of goods and services the Z20t for intensive content creation tasks, you wouldn't want to.

It's not designed for that purpose anyway. More important for a hybrid laptop computer like this is how immobile it feels for everyday, mundane computing tasks. Its Core m5 CPU is spry decent, A distinct above, and so is its storage. The AS SSD storage bench mark clocked the Z20t's Samsung PM871 SSD at 480MBps for read pep pill and 261MBps for write speed using a 1GB data set. That's satisfactory along spec for that drive.

In the 10GB test, writes dropped rather sharply to 160Mbps, but this South Korean won't affect mainstream users. Overall, the fast sustained read and slow sustained write speeds mean you get the snappiness of an SSD during the boot and when loading programs and files, but not nearly as much when closing programs, saving files, and copying tremendous amounts of data to the aim.

Conclusion

The Z20t is an superior hybrid laptop that much adequately fills both the pad of paper and laptop roles. It plays finer as a laptop than many of the traditional models I've seen recently, and its battery life is indisputable. Given the C2112's price, though, we're guessing this is the one the boss wish get, unless you workplace for a generous company.