Digital Trends

Lenovo IdeaPad U110 June 16th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Features and Design

The new IdeaPads from Lenovo come in several different sizes, including 15.4” and 17” as well as the 11.1” ultra-portable we’ll be reviewing. Though a lot of media attention was heaped upon Lenovo’s brilliant X300 for being so thin and light, the IdeaPad U110 is even thinner and lighter at .72 inches thick and weighing just 2.4lbs.

This is an incredibly thin and light notebook, though it’s not an anemic machine by any standards. It’s powered by a low-voltage Intel Core 2 Duo “Merom” processor running at 1.6GHz that plugs into an Intel 965 “Santa Rosa” motherboard. It sports 2GB of DDR2 memory and uses onboard Intel X3100 graphics to run Windows Vista Home Premium.

Pieces of Flair

As you may know, Lenovo’s ThinkPad notebooks have as much flair and style as sheet rock, so we were very pleasantly surprised to see so many small touches of elegance and style all over the IdeaPad. For starters, the LCD lid is covered in an interesting pattern that causes the lid to have a unique texture and appearance, and Lenovo put some of this pattern on the underside of the notebook as well. Second, above the keyboard there lies a hidden row of customizable hotkeys. During normal operation the keys are invisible, but if you apply a small bit of pressure anywhere along the area the keys softly come into view, as if a soft orange lamp was slowly illuminating. The buttons even have orange “flowers” wrapped around them, if that makes sense. Finally, the keyboard keys have the same glossy black sheen as the rest of the notebook, giving it an overall elegant look and feel.

Widescreen Display

Another interesting feature of the U110 is its 11.1” display. It runs at a widescreen resolution of 1366x768 and has an interesting design in that there’s no bezel on top of the display like you typically see. Instead the display is completely flush and rests behind the glossy cover of the display, making it totally smooth all the way to the edge of the display on all sides. Lenovo has also placed the activity lights inside the lower portion of the LCD bezel, so rather than seeing a light flash somewhere on the edge of the notebook you see a soft blue light illuminating underneath the display. It also features an integrated 1.3MP webcam that ties into the system’s facial recognition software to let you log into Windows with your face.

Ports and connectors

A lot of ultra-portables skimp on ports and connectors due to size constraints, but the IdeaPad shows you can make a notebook thin and still maintain maximum connectivity. Not only does it feature an Ethernet port, but it also has three USB 2.0 ports, a multimedia card reader, an ExpressCard port, FireWire, headphone/mic jacks and VGA out.

Lots of extras

Like most ultra-portables, the U110 does not include an optical drive in the main chassis due to its size, however Lenovo has thoughtfully included a USB DVD-R/RW/CD-R/RW burner. There are also two batteries included in the package, with both a super-slim 4-cell battery and a “sticks out the back” 7-cell battery. Lenovo also throws in a cleaning cloth and a nylon carrying case as well.

Lenovo did an outstanding job with the U110’s design. It’s very sleek and stylish and now what you’d expect from Lenovo.