Lenovo IdeaPad U260
- Category: Notebook Computers
January 24, 2011
Editor's Rating
- Stylish, minimalistic design
- Comfortable keyboard & trackpad
- Good quality 720p display
- Only average performance
The Lenovo IdeaPad U260 offers a minimal design that's geared towards business users, but it looks really for almost anyone. The 12.5-inch display has a 720p HD resolution and you get an HDMI port for high-definition output. There's decent, but not excellent performance, thanks to a slower hard drive.
The IdeaPad U260 from Lenovo has a "mocha brown" color, which is a very dark metallic brown-like color and looks actually quite stylish. The chassis feels very sturdy and measures only about 0.75-inches at the thickest point, which makes it extremely portable and easy to carry around on a long work/school day. It weighs about 3 pounds, which isn't the lightest notebook out there, but it's still quite light.
Once you flip open the lid, you'll find even more of a minimalistic design with a plain (in a good way) and very comfortable chiclet-style keyboard. The mouse trackpad is also quite well-designed and has a good tactile surface that allows for accurate use. Besides that, the only other button besides the power button is a very tiny OneKey system recovery button, which is only accessible by something like a paper-clip. There's also an ambient light sensor on the keyboard deck to automatically adjust the screen's brightness according to your setting's light. We found the sensor to work quite well and it adjusted the brightness to an appropriate level during more occasions.
The 12.5-inch display has a native resolution of 1388 x 766-pixels, which is 720p high-definition quality. The screen quality is quite good as it displayed very good color depth and contrast levels, including while we watched HD content from the Internet. Lenovo also put an antiglare coating over the screen and in our use, it did a respectable job at cutting down glare from overhead lighting.
In terms of ports, the Lenovo IdeaPad U260 doesn't disappoint. It includes 2 USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, HDMI out, gigabit Ethernet and a combo microphone/headphone audio port. There is no optical disc drive with this model in order to cut down on the laptop's overall size, weight and cost.
On the inside you'll find an Intel Core i5-470UM CPU (1.33GHz), 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 320GB 5400RPM hard drive, Intel integrated HD graphics and 802.11b/g/n + Bluetooth 2.1 wireless connectivity. The lack of a 7200RPM hard drive was a little disappointing, but to keep down the cost it was probably omitted. We also would've liked to see an option to substitute a solid-state drive, but maybe that's wishful thinking. Lenovo includes Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) as the operating system.
Performance with the Lenovo IdeaPad U260 was pretty good, but it wasn't as good as some other similar models. The CPU is probably a little underpowered and the slower hard drive doesn't help either. However for most tasks, like the ones that most business and average people would be doing with this laptop, it does very good.
We did like that Lenovo includes no trialware or bloatware with this computer. They only pre-install a few useful utilities and a facial recognition software for security and a Cyberlink Webcam program.
