Lenovo IdeaPad U310 13.3-Inch Touchscreen Ultrabook (Graphite Gray)

I generally gravitate towards Lenovo ThinkPad products for business, because they've always worked well for me in the past. I usually stay away from the IdeaPad line, because they're inferior, but I purchased this laptop for my dad, and was pretty pleasantly surprised. First off, the roughly equivalent ThinkPad (Carbon X1 Touch) is about three times the price, so I was heavily motivated by price as a factor. Of course the Carbon is a great laptop (I've used the previous generation for over a year, and I love it completely.) but it's tough to justify spending $1800 on a laptop that my Dad is going to use for email, Internet browsing and playing solitaire.

First off, the construction quality is fantastic. It feels very solidly built, and all the pieces fit together nicely. The touchscreen works great, and overall the screen looks pretty good. I like the fact that it has a lot of USB ports. (My ThinkPad has only two, which can be a real problem sometimes.)The hard drive, although theoretically slow, seems pretty zippy. I'm guessing this is because of the 24GB SSD that's attached. (It doesn't show up as an extra drive, so I can only assume there is some proprietary caching mechanism that it uses to keep the stuff that needs fast access on there.) The fact that it has only 4GB of RAM (non-upgradeable) was also a concern to me, but I've found in practice that setting up the virtual memory on an SSD makes 4GB seem like a lot more, since the HDD doesn't have to churn when swapping out programs between physical and virtual memory. I am a very heavy multi-tasker (I even have a second monitor so that I can multi-task) and the 4GB of RAM has never seemed to slow down the computer.

There are some negatives, which is why, although I'm very happy with the laptop, I was reluctant to give it five stars. First of all, I'm not nuts about the keyboard. Windows 8 has quite a few "special" new buttons that I've become accustomed to, such as the search button and the settings button. Many new laptops have these buttons on the function keys, but this one does not. Also, I found myself constantly trying to hit the backspace key, and instead hitting the "home" key, taking be to the beginning of the line. I don't have this problem on my Carbon X1, because the backspace key is the rightmost key on the keyboard. Finally, I hate glossy screens. If glossy is your thing, then this might not be a big deal to you, but I can't stand them. The ThinkPad has a matte screen finish, as do most business-centric laptops I've come across. I realize that the glossy looks pretty in the showroom, and might make a screen stand out among others, but they're impossible to keep clean, especially on a touch-screen device, and I avoid them whenever possible.

I liked the design and size, but it won't connect to my Verizon Fios router which have been working well with 8 mobile devices. It seems to be connected with full antenna strength, but it always show 'Limited'. I had a technical support from Lenovo for an hour, but it didn't help at all. I replaced this with a new one. It has same network problem. Even worse is that now it shows warning message saying that it doesn't support unauthorized battery did they install an unauthorized battery?

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I hanged from Macbook to this computer and was a total failure. This isn't a quality computer and windows 8 wasn't the expected at all.

The computer seams very nice from pics and videos but its not compare to a macbook even if they compare.

I wouldnt recomend this computer to any apple user.

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