Lenovo IdeaPad U350

[ MUSIC ] ^M00:00:03 >> [Scott Stein:] Hi, I'm Scott Stein, senior associate editor at CNET.com and this is the Lenovo IdeaPad U350 laptop. Now we've recently seen a trend of a lot of companies like MSI and Acer releasing relatively affordable, thin and light laptops that use ultra low-voltage processors, but drop the optical drive, so there's no DVD drive inside. This is one of those models. It's got a Pentium single-core, low-voltage processor inside, but a really bright, nice thirteen-inch screen, good keyboard, decent track pad, and really, really loud speakers, strangely. Now again there's no optical drive in this, so it's pretty light. And the battery life is okay; it's not spectacular, but it's not terrible. The power performance on this model is better than you would expect on an Atom-powered netbook. But it's not going to blow you away like a Core 2 Duo laptop. One thing we really love about the U350 is its design; it really walks a good line between professional and personal. The back of it is this nice sort of textured pattern, a criss-cross. The front has a lot of brushed metal around the front. There's glossy black around the edges, around the thirteen-inch screen. It almost looks like a MacBook in terms of its design. The port selection's good too. It has a selection of SD card, USB 2.0 ports. It even has HDMI out, not that I really understand how you would use that, but if you want to output HD video files to your television screen. And it's also got an 802.11 b, g, and n WIFI as well as Bluetooth. Configurations of the U350 run in price somewhere between 629 dollars and 800 dollars, depending on what you put into it. You get up to four gigs of RAM, 320 gigabyte hard drive, which is pretty good for a laptop this size, and in short we really like the feel of this as our, as our sort of like travel laptop. Just don't expect a lot of tremendous horsepower out of it. But again it's a great balance between saving some money on,on going ultra-professional on ThinkPad and getting a little more power than you would in a netbook. I'm Scott Stein, and this is the Lenovo IdeaPad U350. ^M00:02:08 [ MUSIC ]