IdeaPad U100 - Lenovo's Best Idea Yet?

Research Triangle Park (NC) - Lenovo today introduced the IdeaPad U110, an ultra-portable notebook that isn’t cheap and doesn’t offer any spectacular hardware features, but is certainly among the most attractive notebooks for road warriors on the market today.

If you were asked to sum up the notebook trends of the recent months, we are pretty sure you’d come up with products such as Apple’s Macbook Air, Lenovo’s X300, the EeePC and possibly systems such as Acer’s Gemstone series. It seems that innovation in the notebook segment is all about style and size these days and if you were to merge devices currently available on the market, you’d probably come up with something like Lenovo’s IdeaPad U110.

In size, it is positioned between the EeePCs and traditional notebooks, but takes down a unique styling into the ultra-portable market. It is slightly thinner than Lenovo’s own flagship notebook (Thinkpad X300) and is actually not far away from thickness of the Macbook Air’s thickest part (0.72" vs. 0.88"). Pricewise it is in Macbook Air territory as well, but the screen size (11.1") is closer to the latest Asus EeePC.

But if you compare it to the EeePC, you have a regular hard drive rather than a small flash chip, a faster processor and a tendril texture that etched into the aluminum-alloy top cover of the IdeaPad - and makes the whole system look much more expensive. But then, it is much more expensive - $1899.

In exchange you can chose between red and black versions of the U110, you get the aforementioned 11.1" (1366x768 pixel) display, a 17-watt Core 2 Duo L7500 (65 nm Merom core, 1.6 GHz, 4MB L2 cache) processor, Intel’s GMA X3100 integrated graphics chipset, a 120 GB hard drive, 2 GB memory, a 1.3 MP webcam, Ethernet and Wi-Fi support as well as an external DVD burner. It’s not a multimedia powerhouse, but it should be enough for on-the-road applications.

There is even a decent battery that should provide enough juice for an entire work day. Lenovo says that the standard 4-cell battery will power the notebook for about 2 hours, while a larger (and included) 7-cell battery adds another 6 hours.

Tom’s Guide will publish a comparative review of he U110 and the MacBook Air shortly.