Lenovo ideapad U110

Lenovo ideapad U110 Review

Overview, Design and Features

Review Summary

• Pros:
  • 
    
  • Great looks
  • Decent power under the hood
  • Decently Priced for an ultraportable
  • External Optical Drive
  • Nice extra's included
  • Appropriately priced for some

• Cons
  • External Optical Drive
  • Uninspiring Sound output
  • Glossy surfaces attract dust / oil
  • For an ultraportable, it could use better battery life
  • Spendy for some

Bottom Line:
An excellent ultraportable - but spendy for the average consumer. And even though it's the consumer line up - it's a beautiful looking laptop that has decent power to do most every business aspect - however, the glossy look isn't for everyone and the sound leaves something to be desired.

Specifications:

Rating:

Design & Features

Overview

Meet the Lenovo U110 - its sleek, it's small, and this particular one is Red. It is available in black but who wants black when red looks this good? The U110 is Lenovo's launch into the consumer grade 'ultraportable' category, and seemed to have hit a home run with this unit. It's everything an ultraportable should be, without the suit and tie required color scheme.

Design
The case on the U110 can be described simply as 'handsome' or 'beautiful' whichever term you prefer.

The aluminum/metal LCD lid has a mesmerizing Celtic like etching design - and even though at first glance I thought it was a bit chic, it didn't offend me and eventually grew to my liking more and more. When you take out the U110, be prepared for fellow mobile users eyeing your ultraportable U110 with color envy - wishing their stark black or aluminum lid had as much character as yours. The matte black magnesium body features the etching design as well - and is very durable. It offered little to no flex and no weak spots when the U110 was transported by holding the base.

The LCD bezel is extremely thin. Even though it is made out of highly durable alumiunum - I found it very susceptible to flex and puncture stress. It is however, one of the items in which makes this unit so light, so care must be handled when opening/closing and transporting this unit. I would not recommend caryying this, nor moving this laptop directly by the LCD lid alone.

Keyboard

Upon opening the U110 - you will be greeted by a shiny, glossy, piano black finish that surrounds the LCD display, but the glossy features also continue to the keyboard where the entire unit features a mirror like piano black finish - which looks really nice, but attracts fingerprints and dust very quickly.

The keys however, were a treat to use, as they were a bit oversized and actually made typing very efficient. I personally don't like the glossy look applied to the keys, and since they are so black - typing in the night was a bit hard to have (could really use that LED light from the x300 here!) If this unit had a LED backlit keyboard, it simply would be amazing - but it doesn't.

Directly above the keyboard are the volume and media lauch touch areas. The volume is constantly illuminated, while the media quick launch touch area is activated by swiping (or touching) the glossy area above the keyboard, in which, this area will then illuminate. These were accented by the same Celtic like designs, but weren't overpowering bright. They time out and dim back down after a few seconds if they are not used.

The track pad is nothing fancy, but works very well - however, the glossy buttons could use some work, and it's hard to distinguish left and right clicks in the dark. If they had a tactile pattern assigned to one button I feel it would help, but since it feels so much like the rest of the palm area and its flush mounted - finding and utilizing can be a little difficult.

Speaking of the palm area - there's not a lot of extra room to it, and from what we could tell - our unit had some funky light distortion from the plastic material - most likely from a protective coating to the materialor oils / debris on the plastic, but no matter how many times we tried to keep it clean with the included cleaning cloth, it got dirty rather quickly.

Sound
The sound from the two tiny speakers mounted opposite the user can best be described as 'something to be desired'. Even though - they did provide a decent amount of volume, it's defiantly geared for simple implementation and won't impress much of anyone in the audiophile area. Highs were very tinny, and lows were non-existent. I would highly suggest getting headphones / external speakers if you were to use this in any other setting than very, very casual listening. However - it's nice to point out that this ultraportable, still has stereo sound - unlike some other ultra-portables we can think of

Connectivity
Good looks aren't the only thing going for the U110 - it has decent power under the lid for an ultraportable and features a very decent amount of connectivity options.

The left side features the power jack, RGB output, two USB 2.0 ports, and a wireless on/off switch.

The right side features an express card slot, card reader, audio in / out - mini-firewire, USB 2.0 port, Network Ethernet and lock slot.

The rear of the unit doesn't feature anything and is free of connections - although the look changes from glossy to matte when switching to the larger cell battery.

The front is void of connetivity options, and only offers some LED status lights under the trackpad.

A blue power LED, an orange charging LED, and a pink WIFI led. Nothing special - and they aren't located in the most convenient of locations - but do offer some input without opening the LCD.

Display
The U110 features a glossy 11.1' LED backlit display running a native 1368x768 resolution making it a very crisp display for its size- and was had wonderful color output and evenly lit backlighting.

It also offered great viewing angles for the sides, and excellent vertical viewing angles.

This is a really nice display - although, the gloss finish does show some signs of imperfections. It could be better implemented as it was sometimes a bit too glossy, and some places it appeared to have an uneven surface application (dips or indents) made it look less than perfect.

Size & Weight
Measuring in at a mere 10.8 inches by 7.7 inches, and a height of only three quarters of an inch, it's a great example of what an ultraportable should, and can look like.

The U110 comes with two batteries, a 7 cell and a 4 cell - with the weight just over 3 pounds with its 7 cell battery, and just under 2 and a half with the included 4 cell.

It's a worthy road companion and won't hurt the shoulders when transporting it around in it's included Lenovo notebook sleeve. One thing we did note about the 7 cell, is that it made the laptop have a little ledge on the rear to carry with, which actually served the U110 some good. And another thing on the 4 cell battery - it was a son-of-a-gun to try and remove this from the U110! It had no points to really grab to help shimmy the battery out of it's place.

The Lenovo U110 does not have an internal optical drive; however Lenovo opted to ship an external optical drive with each unit. It's not a bad option and easy enough to connect to the U110 - simply utilize two USB ports on the left side of U110 and you're in entertainment mode.

The power brick - is exceptionally proportional to the unit, and isn't obstrusive at all.

Upgrading / Configuration Options
There is only one configuration offered by Lenovo, and this is it. You could, however, in theory, install yourself a faster hard drive and a 2GB RAM stick to replace one of the 1GB to bump up your total RAM to 3GB, but would it be worth it on a system like this?

Features:

This device features the VeriFace log in application utilized by it's 1.3mp lcd webcam - which is pretty neat, but makes the boot-up / log-in incredibly sluggish. The U110 features Bluetooth and A/B/G connectivity for wireless networks. It does not have 3G nor GPS built in, but at this price point and market it's understood.

Another feature of the Lenovo ideapad U110 is the novo key - which, when pressed as power when the unit is off - will start the automatic recovery to make the unit factory fresh. This also, however, takes a big chunk out of the usable hard drive space - nearly 20gb - making the actual hard drive space usable to users around 100gb.

Performance & Conclusion

The 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 runs decently within Windows Vista Home Premium- and even though not a top of the line CPU seemed snappy enough, especially when this is in such a tiny platform. 2GB of DDR2 Ram help the U110 out of course, however, we did find the hard drive - at 120GB and spinning at the lowly 4,200rpm, does task the unit to open larger files or resume from hibernation. You can read all about our testing methodoligy here (http://www.laptoplogic.com/about/test/)

Windows Vista Experience Score
We include this score to help consumers easily identify normal components that compliment or hinder a systems performance.

Speedy for such a small processor - and at only 1.6ghz not a bad number, falling only slightly behind the M305 we just tested with a 2.1ghz T8100 and an extra gig of RAM!

Unexpected - this unit surpassed our X300, Toshiba M305, and Lenovo 3000 - capable to play older games, but don't expect much more than that.

Pretty impressive number for such a small package, and even though 20 some points behind the Fujitsu E8410 and 10 behind the M305, this has a much less speedy CPU and I think it's a very respectable score for a unit with these specifications.

Battery Performance

The battery performance varied on which battery you choose to equip the U110 with. The smaller, 4 cell battery had an average life span of almost 2 hours - but only got about an hour into a DVD before the unit shut-down. That was pretty horrible. However, the 7-cell battery life was nearing 2.5 hours watching a DVD and nearing 3 and half hours on normal usage with the screen at 75% brightness and wireless enabled. It's not the absolute best we've seen (as in our Vaio TZ we just reviewed that neared 8 hours) but it is acceptable. If you brought both batteries along, you technically would have a 5-6 hour unit depending on how you utilized the power saving features.

Conclusion
At nearing $2,000 - this is sort of a justification for those who could afford it. It is an 11.1" ultraportable, and the smaller the size, it seems to be bigger the price. Honestly, if I were in the market and had the funds, I would purchase this unit as it has everything I would want to look for in an ultraportable - and even though it does have it's minor flaws it was rock solid on it's performance (for it's hardware) and it caught more attention than any other notebook I've used (ok, minus the tiny Asus Eeepc). The included accessories are an added bonus - the light weight and rigid materials make this laptop not only durable, but good looking as well. The performance, even though not a blazing fast machine - would easily suffice in most things one would need to accomplish on the road, and would even handle some photoshop editing. I do wish that you could opt for a beefier configuration as it only comes pre-configured with fixed specifications. Is it worth $1,849 - to some yes, but to others this falls clearly out of their budget - and for good reason perhaps, if it fell in everyone's budget, it wouldn't make it that desireable.