Lenovo IdeaPad U310 review

Rather than use the same wedge-shaped chassis many other manufacturers have opted for with their Ultrabooks, the Lenovo U310 is just 18mm thick all the way through, rather than tapering to a point. This makes room for extra ports, including an Ethernet port. Two USB3 ports, one standard USB, HDMI and 3.5mm audio complete the selection, with a neatly recessed multi-format card reader in the front edge.

The lid and chassis bottom are made from aluminium, but the U310 is mostly made from plastic. There are three colours to choose from, so if you aren’t a fan of our aquamarine blue review sample you could opt for a cherry red or graphite grey model instead. Regardless of colour choice the IdeaPad U310 is a rather minimal affair, with the only design flourish being the machined aluminium power button.

Lifting the lid reveals a startlingly white keyboard tray with contrasting black keys. Lenovo usually makes fantastic laptop keyboards, but the one used here is something of a disappointment. The Chiclet-style keys are fine for the most part, but their layout is compromised to fit the 13in chassis. The enter, backspace and page navigation keys are much smaller than usual and have been shunted to the far edge, meaning it will take some practice before your word documents are completely free of accidental key presses. There’s also a huge amount of flex in the keyboard tray that manifests itself with even the lightest touch.

The glass all-in-one touchpad is excellent, mainly thanks to its large size and responsive feel. The smooth glass texture occasionally creates friction that slows down your finger, but for the most part it felt accurate and even responded well to multi-touch gestures. The buttons don’t have a lot of travel, but are responsive.

The 13.3in display has a rather sizable glossy white bezel, but the surprisingly bright backlight makes sure your eyes are drawn to the screen rather than what’s around it. The 1,366×768 resolution is standard fare for most mid-range Ultrabooks. Tight viewing angles mean you need to be straight-on to get the best image quality.

The very glossy screen coating might be able to produce vivid colours, but it doesn’t help reduce screen glare – in bright light it becomes almost impossible to see what’s on screen. There’s a reasonable amount of screen tilt, but you’ll need to sit face-on to the screen to get the best contrast.

The weedy integrated speakers aren’t going to replace a pair of headphones, as they struggle to produce loud audio and lack any resemblance of bass. Music sounded tinny, with a dominating high-end, although it was still clear enough for the occasional YouTube video.

The i5-3317U processor normally runs at 1.7GHz, but can Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz, and with 4GB of RAM on-board it should handle all your everyday tasks without any slowdown. The IdeaPad U310 coped reasonably well with our multimedia benchmarks, scoring 48 overall.

Intel’s processor also provides the graphics power. The integrated HD 4000 chip is capable of playing older games at medium to high detail settings, but it struggled with our Dirt 3 test – 14.65fps is one of the lowest scores we’ve seen from an Ultrabook.

There’s a 500GB hard disk, which provides plenty of storage space. It’s paired with an 8GB SSD cache, which helps speed up boot times: from a cold boot we were at the Windows Desktop in less than 20 seconds.

Battery life was slightly disappointing in Ultrabook terms – the U310 only just broke six hours in our light-use test, meaning you’ll need to keep the (admittedly rather small and light) power adaptor close by if you’re planning to spend all day out of the house or office.

As one of many second-generation Ultrabooks to go after the mainstream, rather than the high-end, the IdeaPad U310 gets a lot of things right. It’s low price and small form factor are certainly attractive, but if you want a bit more power and better battery life the slightly-larger HP Envy 6 is the better choice.