Lenovo IdeaPad U300s review

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.