Lenovo Ideapad U330 review: Brilliantly designed laptop

Lenovo Ideapad U330, the brilliantly designed laptop, is amongst the latest product in Lenovo’s 13.3 inch notebook series. It has been built on the Montevina platform from Intel and switchable graphics from AMD. This design makes the system quite unique from the likes of other competitors of this category including Apple’s MacBook and Dell 1330 (XPS). In fact, the Ideapad U330 has taken a huge step forward from the conventional and popular IBM’s thinkpad series, as it offers a host of exciting features including media controls that are touch sensitive, HDMI out, switchable graphics which saves power and has an Intel Centrino2 processor.

Build and Design

The new Lenovo Ideapad U330 has been designed with a glossy display cover, super thin Liquid Crystal Display and a very low profile chassis, making it visually pleasing. The Ideapad U330 has a unique pinstripe scheme of paint on its inside along with glossy media controls, that are touch sensitive. It has also has a smooth and seamless finished frameless display, which makes it look really great. The build quality could have been made better, but you would really like the overall looks of the Lenovo U330.

Display

The Ideapad U330 has a frameless display having nice looks, but is highly reflective in its nature. It has exceptional contrast and colours along with some good black levels with its LED backlit. You’ll find the horizontal viewing angles to be much better than the vertical ones and it also has lesser reflections in bright viewing office conditions.

Keyboard and touchpad

Lenovo Ideapad U330 comes with a keypad that is very easy and convenient to type on and offers a good support for strong continuous typing pressure. The keyboard style is similar to the business grade IBM thinkpad laptops.

The touchpad based on Synaptics is very sensitive and has a soft matte finish on its surface texture. The U330 has large touchpad buttons and each of them has a long throw when pressed.

Performance and Benchmarks

The Lenovo Ideapad U330 has an excellent system performance with a Core2Duo P7350 processor from Intel and a dedicated graphics card of ATI Radeon (3450). The notebook was pretty good in handling mild gaming and delivered no problem in resuming normal activity. The switchable graphics system in the Ideapad U330 helps in easy transition to low power usage without rebooting the system. The notebook also put off lesser heat, consumed less power and ran almost all 3D features of Windows Vista without any problem. The audio performance was pretty average when compared to similar notebooks of its range and had many weak points.

Battery Life

The Lenovo Ideapad U330 has an amazing battery life of nearly 4 hours with Vista power profile switched to balanced, brightness of screen set to 60% and graphics switched to power saving mode. The battery life drops to nearly 2hours 40 minutes on enabling dedicated graphics and that is also not too bad.

The Ideapad U330 is an excellent choice with solid looks, bright screen, light weight, switchable integrated graphics and good overall system performance. Although, some more areas including paint quality and sound need improvement but still the Ideapad U330 is a pretty good consumer level laptop with a price of $1000.

Specifications of Ideapad U330

Processor: Core2Duo, P7350 2-Ghz processor from Intel (3Mb cache, 1066 Mhz FSB)

OS: Genuine MS Windows Vista Premium

Memory: 2-GB DDR3

Display: 13.3 inch WXGA, 1280×800

Hard drive: 250 GB SATA (5400 rpm)

Battery: 6-cell lithium

Weight: starting from 4.2 lbs

Dimensions: 12.5inx9.3inx0.9in

Pros: Excellent battery life, brilliant design and large hard drive

Cons: Reflective frameless screen

MSRP: $1000 (base price)