Lenovo IdeaPad U300s review

Launching several months after the first wave of Ultrabooks, the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s has some catching up to do. A quick glance at the spec sheet might not reveal anything outstanding, but in the flesh the U300s is easily one of the most pleasant-to-use Ultrabooks we’ve tried so far.

Lenovo is best known for its business machines, so it comes as no surprise that the U300s has a somewhat reserved design – the brushed metal finish is a monochrome grey rather than startling silver and unlike other Ultrabooks, which when closed taper to a point, the chassis is a consistent 15mm thick throughout. This is still incredibly thin, and the added thickness make the laptops feel more rigid. There was still a small amount of flex in the display bezel, but the main body stayed firm in our hands.

Although it has space for ports all the way around its chassis, Lenovo has only fitted two USB ports, a full-size HDMI output and a combination audio jack to the U300s. Only one USB port supports the faster USB3 standard, and there’s no card reader slot or network port. This puts it at a disadvantage to Toshiba’s Portege Z830, which has both, but you’ll still be able to connect to wireless networks and devices using 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Intel’s WiDi wireless display technology.

What the U300s lacks in connectivity it more than makes up for it in display quality. The 13.3in display has a 1,366×768 resolution, which is slightly low considering the price of the laptop, but images look incredibly sharp and colours are beautifully vibrant. Oddly, given Lenovo’s business heritage, the U300s has a glossy screen finish that can reflect overhead light sources, but has higher contrast and more vibrant colours than many matte screens. Viewing angles are wide and there’s plenty of screen tilt, so you should be able to angle the screen to avoid too much reflection.

The U300s uses the processor’s integrated graphics to power the display, so although you’ll have no trouble watching video, you’ll struggle to play games at a decent frame rate. We saw a jerky 13.1fps in our Dirt 3 test, so you’ll either have to dial down the details and resolution or stick to older titles to make things playable.

The full-size keyboard was excellent to type on, thanks to the generously-spaced keys. Each key has slightly more travel than we’ve seen from other Ultrabooks’ keyboards, which makes faster typing more comfortable. The punctuation keys are all where you would expect, but some people may not like the function keys defaulting to Lenovo’s pre-defined media shortcuts, meaning you have to use the Fn key to access function key shortcuts. You can change the default behaviour in the laptop’s BIOS. We also struggled to adjust to the half-height enter key, which is non-standard for a UK keyboard layout.

The all-in-one touchpad directly below the keyboard is a great size, with a smooth finish that creates minimal friction. The touchpad buttons are integrated into the touchpad’s surface, but there’s not a huge amount of travel in the buttons, so it can be difficult to know whether your clicks have registered.

In terms of performance, the U300s doesn’t stray far from the rest of the Ultrabook pack – a dual-core Intel i5-2467m running at 1.6GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD makes for a speedy system in desktop applications, including our multimedia benchmarks. An overall score of 37 is less than the i7-powered Asus Zenbook managed, but still fast enough for most tasks. If you need more performance, there is a version of the U300s powered by a faster Core i7 processor, but this costs £1,200 from www.amazon.co.uk. The U300s managed a fantastic seven and-a-half hours in our light-use test, making it the best Ultrabook we’ve seen so far for working away from the mains.

With its minimalist appearance and fantastic build quality, the U300s is a gorgeous example of Intel’s Ultrabook specification. It’s also quite well priced compared to the competition, but then it lacks some ports and uses a slightly slower processor than most. Business users will prefer the Toshiba’s Portégé Z830 for its integrated Ethernet and VGA ports, and, despite its £60 higher price, we think the Asus ZenBook UX31 is a better all-rounder thanks to its higher screen resolution and faster performance.