I was using the Dynabook Portégé X30L-G business laptop, the world's lightest 13-inch business laptop, for a while and today we are going to have a detailed review of the Dynabook Portégé X30L-G covering its design, features, performance, and all of its pros and cons.
This review is divided into different sections, covering the pros and cons of each of them separately.
But first of all, let me tell you about the Dynabook brand. This is actually Toshiba's business laptop brand that only produces business laptops. So if you have never heard about the Dynabook earlier, consider it as Toshiba.
Dynabook Portégé X30L-G - Detailed Review
Unboxing
Inside the retail box of Dynabook Portégé X30L-G, you will find the 65-watt power brick along with the charging cables, and Dynabook Portégé X30L-G In the regular retail box, you will also find some quick start guide and user manuals as well.
Design and Build Quality
The most highlighted feature is the weight of the Dynabook Portégé X30L-G. It was just 870 grams. That is less than two pounds, making it one of the lightest business laptops in the 13-inch screen segment. It is also just 17.9 mm thick. So it's not only one of the lightest, it's pretty slim as well.
It comes with magnesium chassis and because of that, the build quality is pretty solid. It comes with Military Standard, MIL-STD-810G certification. So the device can easily survive minor drops, extreme temperature, humidity, dust, etc., making it a pretty strong device.
It comes with Onyx blue color with a silverish gold accent, so the device looks premium. The back of the body is quite fingerprint resistant as well. And the most impressive thing is that even though it is just 17.9 million thick, Dynabook is providing nearly every single slot and port that you can think of. We got the USB Type-C port, a full-size HDMI port.
We got a 3.5mm audio jack, the micro SD card slot, two USB Type-A ports, a display port, and also a Gigabit LAN port. And that's quite impressive because you will not find an RJ45 port in any of the business laptops these days. Because of the slim body, Dynabook expanded the Ethernet port slot towards the bottom to accommodate it, a really nice and impressive implementation.
The bezels on the sides of the screen are quite thin but we got thicker bezels at the top and bottom. The good part is that the Dynabook Portégé X30L-G comes with an HD Cam along with an infrared camera with facial recognition for Windows Hello.
At the bottom, we got some ventilation grilles and two tiny bottom-firing speakers. There's the fingerprint sensor provided on the trackpad but the color of the fingerprint module matches with the rest of the body of Dynabook Portégé X30L-G so much that in the low light situation, you won't be able to locate fingerprint sensor easily to use it. But the good part is that we still got the Windows hello on this device that can be used to unlock the laptop without touching it.
Hardware Specs and Performance
Dynabook Portégé X30L-G comes with the 10th generation Intel Core i7 processor along with integrated UHD Graphics 620. We got the 16 GB DDR4 RAM, along with 1TB SSD PCI-E storage with Intel Optane, out of which 901 GB is user available.
In our benchmarking tests, Dynabook Portégé X30L-G scored nice points considering the hardware specs of the device. And the performance of this laptop was buttery smooth throughout our test. I was able to do heavy multitasking with plenty of applications, browsers, Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook etc. open at the very same time and I never felt any lag or any kind of issue while using this device. So the performance is actually better compared to the test score results we got in the benchmarking.
But under the heavy load condition, the device heats up a lot. Especially the part right over the keyboard heats up a lot and the fan gets quite noisy when the device is going through a heavy workload.
Talking about the connectivity as I have already mentioned above, we got plenty of slots and ports It also comes with Intel Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless connectivity. The only thing I'm missing here is the lack of a Thunderbolt port. But again by providing a Gigabit LAN Ethernet port and a full-size HDMI port, Dynabook is compensating for the lack of a Thunderbolt port quite nicely.
The infrared camera with facial recognition on Dynabook Portégé X30L-G is very accurate, very fast, and works perfectly every single time with Windows Hello.
Keyboard and Typing Experience
Talking about the typing experience, we got a tenkeyless keyboard and the keyboard is one of the things that I did not like on this device. First of all the keys are quite small and if you are moving from a full-size keyboard then you will feel some difficulties on typing it and it will take you some time to get used to this keyboard. So it would be nice if Dynabook could provide an edge-to-edge keyboard as we have seen with some other brands as it would help in improving the size of the keys.
The travel is not too much, but still, it's good enough for a good enough typing experience. The keyboard is backlit and it comes with two levels of backlighting, but another major problem here is that the backlighting is not equally distributed. Especially few keys like Print Screen etc do not have any backlighting. So in low light situations where you are using the backlighting on the keyboard on this device, you will still feel some difficulties in typing even though the backlighting is turned.
The trackpad is quite nice. It's very responsive, very accurate. The clicks are satisfactory and also very responsive. The fingerprint sensor is also very accurate and fast. We got two bottom-firing tiny speakers. And even though they are loud enough to be used for daily usage, the audio quality is not great. It's very tinnish and good only for video conferencing purposes, so it is better to use a headphone if you want to listen to music or watch movies on this laptop.
Battery Life
Because of its slim and lightweight body, the Dynabook Portégé X30L-G comes with just a 42 Wh battery. It can provide up to 14 hours of battery life if you just use it for watching videos. But on my personal usage, it survives for nearly eight hours and it is not that bad as well. The good part is that it comes with quick charging technology, so you can quickly charge it in nearly two hours from 0% to 100% using the DC-in and or the USB type-C port provided.
Screen and Display
We got a 13.3-inch matte finished Sharp IGZO Full HD screen on Dynabook Portégé X30L-G. So the display quality is quite nice. The visuals are sharp but because of the non-reflective matte finished coating, the colors are not that punchy but the good part is that it avoids the reflection on the screen.
The maximum brightness level is 470 nits and that's quite nice as it allows you to use the device outdoors without facing any issue because of the high brightness and non-reflective coating on the display.
Software Features
Dynabook Portégé X30L-G comes with Windows 10 Pro. We got the DTS Audio processing software that you can use to customize the audio experience on the device. We also got the Dynabook Service Station that you can use to update the software, check the performance of your device, perform some troubleshooting to fix many different hardware issues and to improve the overall performance of the device.
It also comes with Intel Octane memory and storage management that you can use to perform various tasks related to storage and also to improve storage performance. That once again contributes to the overall faster performance of the device.
Conclusion
Overall the Dynabook Portégé X30L-G is a very nice business laptop. The magnesium chassis build quality is premium and strong. It is very slim and is one of the lightest 13-inch business laptops.
The overall performance is nice and smooth. The matte-finished full HD display is sharp and bright, and the device got nearly every single slot and port that you need for connectivity purposes on a business laptop. The only drawback is that the typing experience is not that great on this device,.
So if you're planning to buy a nice business laptop that is slim, lightweight, good in overall performance and battery life then the Dynabook Portégé X30L-G is one of the nice options for you that you must consider.