Lenovo has set itself as the leader in business notebooks, but of recently they have decided to take a bigger interest in the consumer line. Their latest attempt is the U350 which is in a class of its own. For those who are not interested in the netbook screen size, but would like something as light but a little bit more powerful, we present you with the U350.
DESIGN:
The design specs of this notebook are very good and one of the best that you will get for its price. The 13.3 inch system comes with a glossy LCD screen and black bezel as well as a plastic silver deck that resembles brushed metal.
The system weighs in at 3.6 pounds and is only 0.7 inches at its thinnest point and goes to a max of 1.0 inches. So as you can see the device is made to compete directly with the netbook line. Unfortunately, there are no dedicated media or volume keys. But you do have a power button, mute button and one-touch recovery button (something the Acer Timeline 3810t does beautifully).
Onto the keyboard and touchpad, there is a pretty good design used for the former. Although the keyboard might be a little different then that of the ThinkPad it is still a lot easier to type on then every netbook we have tested. However you might notice that one or two of the keys have been shrunken. The touchpad is well designed also and carries a few ridges to make using it a bit easier (friction). Navigating was smooth but the buttons could use a little more work.
Concerning display, as we said before it’s a 13.3 inch screen. Packing the space is a 1366 x 768 pixel resolution display. There is LED backlight so images and everything are crisp, but you might notice a considerable amount of glare if you view the screen from the sides. While we are on the subject of screen, it should be noted that a 1.3 megapixel webcam is built into the screen which allows for easy videoconferencing. Other then the slight motion blur and pixilation, video conferencing was smooth.
Speakers work great and provide one of the best sound qualities you can expect from a notebook in this price range. Audio is loud enough to be heard clearly 20 feet away and audio settings can be adjusted by the included Dolby Sound Room software.
You should note that this does lack a DVD driver, but other then that everything is here including 3 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and VGA out as well as Ethernet, wireless on/off switch and a four-in-one card reader as well as microphone and headphone jacks.
PERFORMANCE:
The U350 is equipped with a 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium SU2700 ULV processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM and a 320GB hard drive that does its thing at 5400 RMP’s. in general, performance was great and while it didn’t set any benchmarks, it was in line with most of its category specific marks. Transferring data, loading software and other basic tasks were great and seeing that this system is running Windows Vista Home Premium we were quite impressed with the marks.
The integrated Intel graphics didn’t do that much to impress us and as you can expect playing Crysis or Far Cry is not going to be something you want to do unless you’re interested in the 4 frames per second thing.
Playing Hulu, YouTube HD videos or other online media can be done without much glitch unless it is put on full screen which in that case, media starts to lag. On he other hand, online games such as WoW, Runscape, Mabinogi and others do play nicely on the system.
On to battery life! We have to say this was quite disappointing as we the 4-cell battery which is included couldn’t get us anything more then 3 hours and an extra half hour. The average for this category is well over 4 hours. At least Lenovo is promising a larger capacity 8 cell battery in a few weeks for a measly $40.
WiFi was strong and thanks to the Draft N support download was impressive handing out 20 megs of download at 10 feet away from the router and dropping down to 15 at 50 feet away.
CONCLUSION:
All in all we were very impressed with the system. Our only major drawback was the lackluster battery performance and the integrated graphics option. But if you want a netbook with the performance of a notebook the Lenovo IdeaPad U350 is for you, and with a starting price of $749 it is hard to resist.
