It feels like the Lenovo U300S is an Ultrabook that many many people had been waiting for. The first reviews were out in November last year but availability has been limited in the consumer channels, which is surprising because this isn’t a B2B product. In Europe today, just weeks before the 2nd-Generation Ultrabooks launch, there’s still a limited number of places where you can buy it, and still at original prices. Surprising, because this is a good Ultrabook. It’s not without a few issues but you’ll find out about them in our full review below.
There are rumors and indicators that Ultrabooks are moving more towards hybrid HDDs and the Lenovo U300e is another indicator in that area. The nasty side effect is that the SSD model, the U300s now only seems to be available with a Core i7 and a $1499 price.
The U300e is launching with a 500Gb hard drive, Core i5 and 4GB RAM – No change from the original U300s that we saw apart from the storage. The price comes in at $1199 at the Lenovo US store though which is shockingly high considering the Samsung Series 5 13.3 is $869 at Amazon.com right now.
Following news that the Lenovo Ideapad U300s is nearing retail shelves is the first full review I’ve seen for the U300s. Acer UX31, you have some competition because Hardware Zone Singapore definitely have the green flag out for the Lenovo U300s although it has to be said that these guys haven’t done a review of the Asus UX31 yet. ‘As Good as It Gets’ is restricted to comparison with the Acer S3.
First though, a round-up of the differences between the Lenovo U300s and Acer UX31 which many of you will be choosing between right now.
The Lenovo Ideapad U300s matches the ASUS UX31 almost spec-for-spec and both appear to be ready to go. Pre-order pages are up (see our information page for the Amazon affiliate links that are available) and at least one website has one for testing. The first statement from James Kendrick, the reviewer for ZDNet was that the Lenovo U300s is “already the best Windows laptop I have ever tested.” Let’s hope there’s no showstoppers as the testing progresses.
While the U300s only has a 1366×768 resolution screen against the UX31’s 1600×900 screen, there are other differences deeper in the specifications. Customers are going to have a hard time deciding between the two…
It’s clear that an Ultrabook is more than just a ultra-low voltage CPU and a thin chassis but how tight are the specs laid down by Intel? Are there any laid down by Intel? Ultrabook is a trademark and therefore likely to be more than just an internal spec-sheet but with no guidance from Intel on what is, and what isn’t, we’ll just have to guess because this slide is pretty much all we have to go on right now.
Anandtech have made a good attempt at a definition though and you can see that here. It includes some extra information that they’ve gleened from PR, interviews and the Computex keynote.
