Lenovo IdeaPad U260 review

While the U260’s svelte design, along with its 1.4kg weight, make it ideal for carrying around with you, its battery life of under six hours in our light usage is a little disappointing. It’s a testament to the advances in laptop mobility that we now consider this a low score, but it’s still more than adequate for most journeys.

Benchmarks don’t tell the full story, however, and despite getting an overall score of 26, the U260 felt much snappier thanks to its 128GB SSD hard disk. The low-power i3-380UM has two physical cores, with Hyper-Threading inflating this to four, but doesn’t support Turbo Boost, so there’s not such a great difference between performance in single- and multi-threaded applications.

There’s no dedicated graphics chip, and the Core i3’s integrated graphics processor isn’t up to playing games, managing only 7.4fps in Call of Duty 4. It can decode HD video however, and you can output both video and audio via HDMI if you want to watch films on a larger screen or plug into an AV amp. The internal speakers aren’t up to reproducing music or soundtracks, although their brash sound will suffice for voice applications.

Limited space means there’s no optical drive, as you’d expect from an ultra-portable, and only two USB ports. We were slightly disappointed that neither of these was a faster USB3 port, and neither supports Sleep and Charge either.

We fell in love with the U260 as soon as we saw it, but having spent some time with it, it’s apparent that technology has taken a back seat to design. That’s not to say the U260 isn’t perfectly functional – it just doesn’t offer as much as other laptops here, such as the excellent Asus U31JG. It does look beautiful though, and we’d certainly understand if your heart won out over your head.