I love Toshiba notebooks. I have used them as my own notebook of choice for almost 16 years. I dallied with a Sony light weight notebook for a while but ended up back with Toshiba.

Now my new toy was purchased for one key reason, disk space. My current Satellite Ultrabook is only 18 months old but it has a small 128G SSD storage device and I need more space. The new Kira is a 256G equivalent SSD and it also adds another 2G of RAM in its total of 8G above the earlier model.

So on to my likes and gripes after 1 day of hardly using it while I started installing software applications.

Aside from the Windows 8 which I will sledge elsewhere, my first gripe is that the Function keys are disabled by default in favour of the settings keys. To use the function keys you must use the Fn + the Fx key combination. Ok, so I can live with that, but it is disconcerting when you hit F5 by accident and disable the glidepad mouse!

The likes list is somewhat longer, the major difference is in the screen hinge which is far more robust and positive in its feel and action on the Kira. The case has more alloy and less plastic and feels more solid. Of course, this adds around 200g to the weight of the unit at 1.3Kg being heavier than the Z830 at 1.1Kg. However on your lap it makes little difference and on a desk or table no difference at all.

The keyboard retains the island key and back lighting style that I loved on the Z830. The units are very close in physical dimensions but the width of the keyboard varies considerably narrower at 267mm vs 195mm on the Z830. The depth of them remains almost the same with only 3mm difference as the top row Fn keys are shallower. Yet the QWERTY keys are the same dimensions, the width difference is in the other keys with a narrower space bar and repositioned and smaller PgUp / PgDn keys. The latter were always my biggest gripe with the Sony notebook I had, as the PgUp / PgDn required a Fn key combination to work.

The Synaptics pointing device or glidepad control mouse seems far more sensitive on the Kira than the one on the Z830 but that could be the difference between brand new and 18 months of daily scratching and bashing.

Both ultrabooks are i7 Intel CPU’s and the Kira has a heftier sound card with inbuilt Harman / Kardon speakers. Not sure if it will make that much difference to me as I am not into watching videos on the computer.

Overall, day 1 with the Kira has been okay. I’ll update this in a week or two when I have finished configuring and have it in daily use.