Gadgetory

hey I'm Scott Stein and with back-to-school shopping season unfortunately right around the corner a lot of people are looking for thin affordable laptops that are like the macbook air but maybe you can save a couple hundred dollars along the way that's a good thing the good news is that when it comes to Windows ultrabooks the price has dropped last year you were looking at maybe a thousand dollars eleven hundred dollars and you're starting to see once for as low as seven ninety-nine case in point the IdeaPad u310 now this may not really look so much like an ultrabook in the sense that it's not super thin it is ultrabook thin at point seven inches but that's still thicker than a macbook air and it weighs about a half pound more than a macbook air is that a macbook now a lot of people are going to ask you that question because it really does look like a macbook it's like the return of the white macbook here the keyboard the large trackpad if you ever been a Windows user and fantasize about having a macbook like laptop maybe this is the one for you and that size fits right in between the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the air where you're getting in here is a core i5 3rd gen intel processor that's a lower processor speed than you'd find in your sort of high-end non ultrabook laptops it's going to give you an equivalent performance to what you'd see in a macbook air you're also going to get in here a 500 gigabyte hard drive you do not get an SSD now a lot of ultrabooks are packing those very fast flash-based storage devices into their laptops and they're expensive you know when you want to about get up to a 256 gigabyte version it can add up now the advantage to that hard drive solution is that you're going to pay a lot less for it and get 500 gigabytes but the flipside is that it won't be quite as zippy but it will function like a regular laptop hard drive in this instance you cannot upgrade to a full SSD so you're stuck with that although certain versions of this laptop will have 32 gigabytes of flash storage to zip up the booting process they can feel a little bit faster there's also four gigs of ram and there's plenty of ports so it's a pretty solid package so what do you lose in this package well you don't get bluetooth and you also don't get a DVD Drive no surprise you don't get that in any ultrabook but a lot of people don't use GV drives anyhow keep it in mind the rest of the package is okay I mean the keyboards find the trackpad is big it's not as great as a macbook air not by a long shot and the battery life is very solid but not spectacular we're really going to get the most out of here is that 799 price the bang for the buck now be aware that there are other laptops out there they're going to hit that price and offer a surprisingly similar set of components the sony vaio t which we reviewed here at cna also look at the dell inspiron 14z which has dedicated AMD graphics and costs a little bit more but again a very similar package there's a category to keep an eye on probably going to pick one of these would be a great back to school laptop if it's not the IdeaPad u310 and maybe one of those others i'm scott stein and that's a look at the lenovo ideapad u310 it is an ultrabook