Dynabook takes on Toshiba’s mantle with the Portege X30W-J laptop

Dynabook is showing promise in Australia with the Portege X30W-J two-in-one laptop.

Dynabook Portege X30W-J two-in-one laptop

Dynabook is showing promise in Australia with the Portege X30W-J two-in-one laptop. Dynabook is a relatively new brand in Australia – previous Dynabooks were rebranded Toshibas but these latest models were designed and made after the name change.

Dynabook is an old brand originally owned by several companies before emerging as part of the Toshiba range. The first Toshiba laptop the T1100 was produced in 1985 and the company claimed it as the first mass-market laptop computer. So while Dynabook is a newer brand in Australia, it shares some DNA with the very first laptop on the market.

Time has marched on, and Dynabook is under new management. It is owned by Sharp Corporation which itself is owned by Foxconn, the same Taiwanese megacompany that assembles iPhones. Foxconn bought Sharp in 2016 for a reported $US3.5bn.

The X30W-J is in the category of sleek small lightweight laptops, weighing just 989 grams. You can easily carry it in one hand and it continues what was the Toshiba Portege range.

This laptop has a matt finish which won’t attract fingerprints; the 1080p screen is mounted on two large hinges which lets the screen rotate almost a full 360 degrees. There are laptop, tabletop, presentation, audience and tablet modes as you rotate the screen.

The laptop has an antiglare, bright, matt 13.3-inch wide touch display with 10 touch points and pen support.

You truly get 2020 specs. My review unit costing $2099 has an 11th generation, Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor rated at 2.40GHz, 8 Gigabytes of memory and a 256GB solid state drive for storage.

Dynabook Portege X30W-J 2-in-1 laptop

It supports the latest wireless standard, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.1. There’s a generous supply of ports around the edges: two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI and a headphone jack at left, along with support for a security lock, USB-3.1 and a microSD card reader at right. The keyboard is populated with five full rows of keys and a half-height sixth row, and a responsive touchpad.

The big question is performance. My expectation with the Core i5-1135G7 chip is improved performance but much more power efficiency. This 11-generation chip of the Tiger Lake-U genre came to market only three months ago in September. I’m also looking for better graphics performance.

I downloaded some benchmark software to find out.

Cinebench R15 returned 82 frames per second with the Intel Iris XE Graphics, which makes the X30W-J suitable for many games. That’s well above the average 60fps rate, but of course dedicated gaming laptops will offer more. The CPU test returned 356 cb – that’s not so spectacular and suggests power efficiency is the order of the day rather than speed.

I performed our usual battery test, viewing a 1080p video at 50 per cent brightness until the battery runs out. The laptop delivered 13 hours six minutes of playback on a single charge, which is very good but not unprecedented.

Dynabook Portege X30W-J 2-in-1 laptop

The X30W-J has two cameras. One is a regular front facing 1280x720 pixel camera with average quality. It is located at the top of the screen and has a privacy lock. The second camera isn’t at the back; rather it is located at the top of the keyboard and points upwards

The X30W-J audio system consists of Dolby Atmos sound with Harmon Kardon speakers on the underneath of the laptop. Sound is reasonable, but nothing special.

The X30W-J is Intel Evo certified, which means it comprises some of the features and performance standards I’ve mentioned: 11th generation processor, Wi-Fi 6, more than nine hours of battery life, Intel Iris X graphics, and Thunderbolt 4. I can vouch for the other required feature that it wakes from sleep within one second, at least with the software on it at present. It supports Windows Hello with both face and fingerprint authentication.

You can buy the Dynabook X30W-J from selected retailers across the country. The Dynabook site will list them for your local area.

Pricing varies from $2099 to $3099 depending on the configuration, processor and memory.

Overall it’s an attractive laptop for working on the go with decent energy efficiency and more than enough power for the average office worker, and it’s very light to carry around.