List Price: $659.99
Sale Price: $594.65
Today's Bonus: 10% Off
I generally gravitate towards Lenovo ThinkPad products for business, because they've always worked well for me in the past. I usually stay away from the IdeaPad line, because they're inferior, but I purchased this laptop for my dad, and was pretty pleasantly surprised. First off, the roughly equivalent ThinkPad (Carbon X1 Touch) is about three times the price, so I was heavily motivated by price as a factor. Of course the Carbon is a great laptop (I've used the previous generation for over a year, and I love it completely.) but it's tough to justify spending $1800 on a laptop that my Dad is going to use for email, Internet browsing and playing solitaire.
First off, the construction quality is fantastic. It feels very solidly built, and all the pieces fit together nicely. The touchscreen works great, and overall the screen looks pretty good. I like the fact that it has a lot of USB ports. (My ThinkPad has only two, which can be a real problem sometimes.)The hard drive, although theoretically slow, seems pretty zippy. I'm guessing this is because of the 24GB SSD that's attached. (It doesn't show up as an extra drive, so I can only assume there is some proprietary caching mechanism that it uses to keep the stuff that needs fast access on there.) The fact that it has only 4GB of RAM (non-upgradeable) was also a concern to me, but I've found in practice that setting up the virtual memory on an SSD makes 4GB seem like a lot more, since the HDD doesn't have to churn when swapping out programs between physical and virtual memory. I am a very heavy multi-tasker (I even have a second monitor so that I can multi-task) and the 4GB of RAM has never seemed to slow down the computer.
There are some negatives, which is why, although I'm very happy with the laptop, I was reluctant to give it five stars. First of all, I'm not nuts about the keyboard. Windows 8 has quite a few "special" new buttons that I've become accustomed to, such as the search button and the settings button. Many new laptops have these buttons on the function keys, but this one does not. Also, I found myself constantly trying to hit the backspace key, and instead hitting the "home" key, taking be to the beginning of the line. I don't have this problem on my Carbon X1, because the backspace key is the rightmost key on the keyboard. Finally, I hate glossy screens. If glossy is your thing, then this might not be a big deal to you, but I can't stand them. The ThinkPad has a matte screen finish, as do most business-centric laptops I've come across. I realize that the glossy looks pretty in the showroom, and might make a screen stand out among others, but they're impossible to keep clean, especially on a touch-screen device, and I avoid them whenever possible.
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The WiFi never worked correctly on this device. It would drop signal constantly and give very low connection speeds. I called Lenovo tech support and they told me to return it because it is a defect in the network card. Google "lenovo u310 wifi" and you will get a 70+ page thread made over a year ago about how this problem exists. Lenovo acknowledges it but still sells the device like it is.Best Deals for Lenovo IdeaPad U310 13.3-Inch Touchscreen Ultrabook (Graphite Gray)
Three stars is stretching it a bit, but I am giving them on Lenovo's reputation alone. About a month after buying this thing, it began refusing to wake up from sleep mode. I did lots of research, and discovered that Lenovo's answer is to partition the drive and reload Windows. Um...NO. I don't have the skill or confidence for something like that, which is why I bought a new computer in the first place. I have since turned sleep mode off, which means that if I unplug my computer and toss it in my backpack without shutting it down, the battery is half dead by the time I get to the coffee shop. Meanwhile, all this trouble was supposedly caused by a Windows update, but Lenovo could wow me by dealing with it in the right way fix it FOR ME.Hybrid SATA and SSD looks like a bad idea at this point. If I had a do-over, I would go with something with only a SSD.
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