New ultrabook boasts 22-hour battery life

Launched on Wednesday in Japan, Toshiba's latest ultrabook, the Dynabook Kira V634, sets a new battery-life benchmark. It can go a scarcely believable 22 hours on a single battery charge.

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Launched on Wednesday in Japan, Toshiba's latest ultrabook, the Dynabook Kira V634, sets a new battery-life benchmark.

Take that Apple. When the company announced that, thanks to a Haswell processer update, its latest superlight notebook, the MacBook Air, could now go 13 hours on a single battery charge, there were gasps of amazement.

However, Toshiba was clearly less than impressed, as its latest ultrabook proves. The 13.3-inch display Dynabook Kira V634 weighs just 1.12kg, supports 4K video output, comes with 8GB of RAM as standard and a solid state 128GB hard disk; but, most importantly, thanks to a Haswell (Intel's fourth generation dual core processor) chip, it can go a scarcely believable 22 hours on a single battery charge and all for just 144,000 Yen (about $1446).

It also has a higher specification counterpart with a better, 2,560 x 1,440 pixel touchscreen display which will retail for 153,000 yen ($1,530) and offers a slightly less impressive 14 hours of battery life between charges. As such it is one of the first devices to meet Intel's updated definition of the term 'ultrabook'.

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For a portable computer to be able to call itself an ultrabook from 2014 it will have to have an Intel Haswell Processor, a touchscreen display and run Windows 8.1 -- these criteria are why Apple's superlight laptop, the MacBook Air cannot be referred to as an ultrabook.

Toshiba is yet to confirm if or when the computers will be coming to Europe or the US.