Lenovo IdeaPad U260

When talking about design in terms of ultraportables, it’s pretty hard to beat Apple’s MacBook Air. Even so, that doesn’t really keep rival manufacturers from doing their best to compete.

Overview and Features

This laptop is a bold, stylish looking 12 inch laptop that’s light, thin and very appealing. As attractive as it may be, we can’t really say the same about the price, seeing as the 899$ starting price tag is anything but affordable.

Equipped with a very light chassis, wonderfully designed textured surfaces, an excellent keyboard as well as several other nice touches, this laptop doesn’t really disappoint when it comes to looks. It doesn’t do so badly in terms of specs either, seeing as it comes with a Core i5 ULV processor, 320 GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM, as well as HDMI and a couple of USB ports. This would definitely be one of the most impressive ultraportables available, if the battery life were better.

This model is one of the first to be equipped with a 12.5 inch screen, making it seem similar to a very slim 13 inch laptop. A rubber coated outer surface does a good job in hiding fingerprints and offers great grip, and a leather-ish textured palm rest proved to be very comfortable. Set in the center is a full raised keyboard, which is similar to the design found on the ThinkPad Edge range. The slightly concave keys are very well spaced too. Above the keyboard, you’ll notice only one power button, between small stereo speaker grills and a couple of status indicator icons light up nicely in tiny grids of white LED lights.

 Brightness and volume controls are assigned to function-combination keys on the d-arrow pad. The glass multitouch touch pad is a tad smaller than on other models, and has dedicated buttons below it, as opposed to a clickpad-style interface. The touchpad proved to be pretty responsive, as well as offering a similar level of traction with the clickpads found on Apple models. One downside would be that, with frequent use the touchpad tends to develop a patch of oily fingerprint smudges which might prove bothersome to get rid of.

Unfortunately, the laptop’s boot up time and overall responsiveness proved to be somewhat slower when compared to other models, due to the CULV Intel Processor that operates at a lower clock speed.

The 12.5 inch, 16:9, LED backlit, glossy display the laptop is equipped with boasts a 1366 by 768 pixel resolution which is fairly standard for the majority of midsized laptops.

Pros

The Lenovo IdeaPad U260 boasts a very luxurious, eye catching design as well as a great keyboard and touch pad, not to mention a very lightweight chassis and significantly comfortable ergonomics.

Cons

We weren’t really impressed with the performance the laptop’s CPU delivered, and the battery life proved to be below our expectations (seeing as it was under three hours) , especially when considering the power saving processor.

Conclusion

The Lenovo IdeaPad U260 is a stylish, nicely designed and solidly built 12 inch ultraportable, but unfortunately, even though it manages to stand out in terms of looks, it’s disappointing battery may be a deal breaker for some.