Digital Trends

Lenovo IdeaPad U110

June 16th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

Remember that cool pattern we mentioned earlier that adorns the laptop’s LCD cover and a portion of the undercarriage? Lenovo put it on the box too, tying the whole package together and making it seem like you’re in for something special before you even take it out of the box.

Once we did remove it from the box we were surprised by how small it was. It’s not tiny like the Asus Eee PC but it’s certainly much smaller than a bigger ultra-portable like the X300, which is pretty much a full-sized notebook.

Our review unit is the black model, but you can order a similar version with a red LCD cover that we think looks a bit cooler than the black model. We also found out quickly the textured LCD cover is a magnet for fingerprints, as is the rest of the glossy black chassis.

After we removed the notebook from the box we were surprised to find so many goodies in the box, as we typically find just the power adapter, software CDs and the unit itself, but as we mention earlier the U110 includes two batteries, a carrying case, cleaning cloth and an external USB optical drive.

First Boot

We pressed the power button and watched the unit come to life. It took 1 minute and 6 seconds to boot to Vista Home Premium, which is average. When it came to the Vista log-in screen we saw the facial recognition software at work, which is called VeriFace. Since we hadn’t registered our face yet we just bypassed it and logged in normally. We eventually registered our face and had no problems using our mug to log into Windows. 

At the desktop things were pleasingly clean. Lenovo has never really been known for massive bloatware violations, and we’re happy to report the IdeaPad continues this trend. The only trialware present was Norton AntiVirus and Office 2007; both of which could be potentially useful to customers. There was an Earthlink ad on the desktop in the form of a Macromedia Flash file, but aside from that the rest of the icons were for Lenovo apps and Cyberlink Power2Go for burning media. While idling at the desktop we checked memory usage and found only 37 percent was consumed, leaving us with over 1.5GB of available memory.

Something we complained about in our review of the X300 was that the size of the Windows installation was gigantic, taking up almost half of the available hard drive space. The IdeaPad thankfully doesn’t suffer from this. Its 120GB 4,200rpm hard drive ships from the factory with a decent-sized 16GB Windows installation, leaving 51.4GB free on the main partition. Lenovo has also created a second partition that is 27GB in size and includes all the drivers for the U110, such as LAN, audio, graphics, etc. It’s a nice touch that would be very helpful if a full reinstall of the OS were to be required at some point in the future.

Desktop performance

Like any ultra-portable, you’re not going to be setting any benchmark records with a low-voltage processor-based machine like the U110. It’s Windows Vista Experience Index score is a middle-of-the-road 3.5, and its 4,200rpm hard drive is also not going to set the world on fire either. However, as we’ve stated before, for a machine this small we don’t have unrealistic expectations, and as long as it can open programs, a web browser and boot in a decent time it’ll be fine for its intended purpose, which is simple emailing and web browsing. In that regard we have no complaints about the U110 – it felt responsive enough to satisfy our basic needs, and was always very quiet even when we could feel a bit of heat coming out of the left-side exhaust. We attempted to run our desktop performance benchmark – PCMark Vantage – on the U110, but once again it was unable to run so we are most likely going to ditch it since it has proven to be extremely unreliable.

Battery Life

A rather nice feature of the U110 is that it includes two batteries – a slim 4-cell unit that rests flush with the chassis when inserted, and a larger 7-cell battery that pokes out the back of the unit a bit when in use. We tested both batteries by connecting to the Internet and playing music (4-cell) and a DVD (7-cell). Overall the battery life was about average, as we netted 56 minutes of uptime with the 4-cell battery and 2 hours and 47 minutes with the 7-cell battery. These times are decent and could easily be extended by shutting off various components and setting the display to shut off after a few minutes, which is a setting we disabled.