HCL ME Ultra 3074 Snap Review

HCL surely had the correct idea when it came to ultrabooks. The market is more than ripe for the inexpensive versions as well. However, from what we can see, HCL has gotten the implementation slightly wrong.

Build & Design

On the looks part, the HCL ME Ultra 3074 does look fairly premium and classy. The lid has a light aluminum finish, while the keyboard deck has a slightly darker brushed metal look. The underside is again of a lighter colour, and that spills over on to the right and left sides as well.

Open the lid, and you see a fairly clean keyboard deck. The layout and the size of the keys is fairly similar to the MacBook Pro, at least that’s how it looks on the outset! Touchpad is fairly decent in terms of real estate space, but the Dell Inspiron 14z’s touchpad is slightly bigger and wider. Not that it made any difference with Windows 7, but with Windows 8, the more space you have for the multi-touch gestures, the better. Port placement is shared between the right and the left side ports.

While the looks of the HCL Me Ultra have been well handled by HCL, the build quality and the overall solidity of the package is slightly less than the best. There is a fair amount of flex everywhere on the chassis. The lid isn’t the thickest one out there, and any extra pressure on it will make it dip. What is really worrying is the amount of play the keyboard deck has near the display hinge. Open the display, or change the tilt angle, and you get a fair amount of movement on deck. Clearly, not something that will last very long. Press down hard on the keyboard and there is a pretty profound dip in the middle. This is not to say that the Dell Inspiron 14z is the best ultrabook in the budget segment, but it is much better built than the HCL ME Ultra. Well, good looks will only take you so far. At least that is true for most ultrabooks!

Specifications & Performance

The moment you compare the spec sheets, the difference is fairly evident. The Core i5 in the Inspiron 14z is by far the better performer, expectedly, then the Core i3 on the HCL ME Ultra. The benchmark tests clearly peg the Inspiron 14z ahead. For illustrating this point, we have the Inspiron 14z’s PC Mark Vantage score of 7404 shows the advantage it has over the 5558 for the HCL. Even in real life performance, the Dell ultrabook is fairly quicker than the HCL ME Ultra. Both ultrabooks have the 500GB primary storage drive and a 32GB mSATA.

Again, where the Dell is considerably ahead of the HCL ME Ultra in terms of gaming and graphics capabilities. Another look at the spec sheet clarifies the reason why HCL is lagging behind again. Inspiron 14z comes with an AMD Radeon 7570M (1GB) chip, while the HCL ME just makes do with the Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. We don’t even need to compare the benchmark test scores to illustrate that the Dell Inspiron 14z is the better deal.

However, there is no running away from the fact that the ME ultrabook offers some excellent battery backup. The battery lasted 207 minutes from full charge to complete discharge in our stressful battery test. This is among the better scores among all ultrabooks, and this should last around 5 hours in a typical office usage scenario. For that reason, and that reason alone, we are even bothering with this ultrabook.

The 14-inch display of the HCL ME Ultra has the fairly commonplace resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, but we like the overall package of the display. It is not reflective for starters, and with matte displays rather rare, this is a huge surprise. Colour reproduction is not very vivid, but the text is handled very well, making text readability easier. It does lose out quite a bit in terms of black levels, but more than makes up for it in the overall scheme of things.

The HCL ME Ultra came preloaded with Windows 7 Basic, and the website still suggests that a Windows 8 update has not been done for this ultrabook. Dell, on its part, has upgraded the Inspiron 14z to Windows 8.

Bottom Line

The HCL ME Ultrabook is directly competing with the Dell Inspiron 14z in terms of the price. Between the two, the Dell has a better build quality, better specifications, and inevitably better system performance, apart from a a dedicated graphics chip for a bit of gaming. The HCL ME on its part offers very good battery life. But that surely cannot be only reason to buy an ultrabook. It is a disappointing effort from HCL, primarily because of the poor build quality.

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LaVie World’s Lightest Ultrabook

How light would you like your Ultrabook? If even 3 pounds seems to heavy to you, try packing the 13.3-inch NEC LaVie Z, which weighs a paper-light 1.9 pounds. We had a chance to go hands-on with the svelte system here at Intel’s Developer Forum and we just couldn’t believe how light it felt in our hands.

At just .59-inches thick, the LaVie Z is also one of the thinnest notebooks on the market. Despite the thinness, we were pleased to see that the Ultrabook, which is made from a lightweight lithium-magnesium alloy, has room for several ports including an SD card reader, two USB ports (one of which is USB 3.0) and a full-size HDMI port. We wish there was an Ethernet port, but you can’t have everything on a system this light.

The 13.3-inch screen touts a respectable resolution of 1600 x 900 which, in our brief hands-on, made images fairly sharp, but colors were not particularly vibrant and the viewing angles on this glossy screen seemed poor as a lot of light reflect off its surface. Even at maximum brightness, the display did not seem particularly bright to us, but to be fair, the notebook was on display in an area of the convention center with a lot of sunlight coming in and hitting its surface.

The LaVie Z’s keyboard has some awkward key sizes and placements, with a tiny undersized right Shift key that sits to the right of the up arrow key, a giant rectangular Enter key that looks like it belongs on an old-school typewriter and a tiny square backspace key. When we pressed the keys they seemed a bit shallow but not overly stiff or mushy. The small, matte touch pad appeared reasonably accurate in our use.

However, the most impressive feature of the NEC LaVie Z is clearly its lightweight chassis. While we normally have difficulty holding a notebook by its deck with just one hand, we were able to hold up the LaVie Z with our left, non-dominant hand while filming with our right. Better still, the Ultrabook did not feel creaky or loosely constructed even when we held it this way.

Though it is made for the Japanese market where it was released in August, Dynamism is now selling the LaVie Z to U.S. consumers for $1,799 with a 1.9-GHz Intel 3rd Generation Core i7 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. - source

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Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook

Samsung is taking the wraps off its 13-inch Series 5 Ultra Touch Windows 8 ultrabook today, and at a starting price of $809.99 for the Core i3 version, it’s one of the more reasonably-priced machines we’ve seen so far. An extra $50 will buy you a Core i5 processor upgrade, but otherwise, both models will have the same 1366x768 10-point touch display, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB hard drive with 24GB of ExpressCache — Samsung’s term for high-speed solid state storage directly on the logic board. The Series 5 Ultra Touch isn’t breaking any records with its 3.83-pound weight, but it’s not bad for a machine with a spinning hard drive.

The company also took a minute to touch on its renamed Ativ Smart PC 500T and 700T Windows 8 tablets, which will be selling for $749.99 and $1,199.99, respectively. While both will be running Windows 8 and not the more limited Windows RT, that extra $450 will buy you an Intel Core i5 processor (the 500T comes with an Atom Z2760), a bump from 2GB to 4GB of RAM, and a doubling of storage, from 64GB to 128GB.

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ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A

The new ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A might look exactly like the old Zenbook UX31E, but remember it is what is on the inside that really counts! ASUS appears to be all about consistency these days and have kept the sleek aluminum chassis the same on this razor thin Intel Ultrabook .

The weight of this thin Ultrabook also remains the same, at 1.3 kg or about three pounds. It is only when you open the Zenbook Prime UX31A that you'll start to see the improvements over the last model. For example you have an illuminated keyboard with a gorgeous 1080p IPS (in-plane switching) display for you to look at when you use it and on the inside you have a 3rd Generation Intel Core i5 or i7 'Ivy Bridge' processor along with the new Intel HM76 Express chipset.

The new processor is faster and also includes improved graphics thanks to the inclusion Intel HD Graphics 4000 technology. The new Intel HM76 Express Chipset brings native support for a pair of USB 3.0 ports, so both USB ports on the Zenbook Prime are SuperSpeed USB 3.0 enabled. ASUS didn't stop there though and fixed a number of smaller issues that end users griped about on the original Zenbook. For example the power connector easily came out on the Zenbook, so it was changed to a different type that 'clicks' in and stays in place on the Zenbook Prime. Basically, ASUS fixed what needed to be fixed and left what was working alone! This is great news for consumers as you get a refined product that has been tried and tested by millions of people.

Before we dive into the Ultrabook that we will be reviewing we need to cover what an Ultrabook is. For starters, Intel has trademarked the Ultrabook name, so only certain laptops that meet the Ultrabook criteria can be called that. According to Intel, a laptop has to meet or exceed these five characteristics to be an Ultrabook.

• Quick Startup - Going from hibernate to keyboard interaction in 7 seconds or less. Resume from sleep should be even faster than that.
• Long Battery Life - The minimum for a single charge of the battery must be at least 5 hours.
• Thinness - Ultrabooks need to be less than 21mm (0.82-inch) thick.
• Enhanced Security - The laptop firmware must support Intel's Anti-Theft and Identity Protection technology.
• Performance - Must be powered by Intel processors.

Basically, The Intel Ultrabooks are Windows powered alternatives to the hot selling Apple MacBook Air! They are thinner, lighter and often faster than ultraportables that many have used in recent years. The thinner designs on Ultrabooks don't look half bad either thanks to use of lightweight materials like aluminum and magnesium alloy for the housing. Inside you'll find powerful 2nd or 3rd generation Intel Core processors and a solid-state drive to give you a laptop that is snappy and responsive.

The downside of Ultrabooks being so thin is that you have to give up a few features that most don't need in 2012 and beyond. For starters the optical drive has been kicked to the curb, so if you want to run a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray you'll need to invest in an external USB drive. Other features missing from most Ultrabooks are the ethernet port and DVI video outputs due to how large those connectors are and a removable battery. Most people are running just Wi-Fi now days, but we still run across a hotel or two that don't have Wi-Fi and that wouldn't be a good thing with an Ultrabook. You can always get adapter cables, but who wants to carry that around as that defeats the purpose of having something so light and portable.

Now that you have know what an Intel Ultrabook is all about, we can get back to the Ultrabook that we will be reviewing here today.

The ASUS Zenbook Prime is available in two sizes, the ASUS UX21A (11.6" display) and the ASUS UX31A (13.3" display). Both sizes come standard with a 16:9 HD display that runs at a screen resolution of 1600x900. If you are buying an Ultrabook we highly suggest spending a little extra and getting the by IPS FHD 1920x1080 pixel display. The 1080p display also includes an antiglare technology that looks much better than a high-gloss display. Once you figure out what size Zenbook Prime that you want and what display you want, you then get to pick the processor and how much storage capacity you want! You have your choice of 128GB or 256GB of SSD drives and either an Intel Core i5-3317U or Intel Core i7-3517UM processors.

The model that we are going to be reviewing today is the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A-DB51. This model is the 13.3-inch model with the 1080p IPS display, 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U processor, 4GB of DDR3 1600 MHz memory (RAM), and a 128GB solid-state drive.

ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A-DB51 Specifications:

• 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U Dual-Core Ivy Bridge CPU
• 4GB of DDR3 RAM
• 128GB SATA III 6Gbps Solid State Drive
• Integrated Intel HD 4000 Graphics
• 13.3" Widescreen IPS Antiglare Display
• 1920 x 1080 Native Resolution
• 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0
• Bang and Olufsen ICEpower Speakers
• Integrated Webcam and Microphone
• Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

The ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A-DB51 runs $1049.95 shipped, which is price competitive with other brands with similar specifications.

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Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga Review

Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 13, which starts at $1,000, is just one attempt to take advantage of Microsoft’s dual-sided operating system. Out of the box, it looks like a traditional notebook, but keep tilting the 13-inch touchscreen back along its hinge, and it folds all the way around until the clamshell is closed again. Only now, the screen is face-up, and the keyboard hangs from the underbelly. You can also open the Yoga partway, keys down, so the screen is facing outward, or stand the device on both of its edges in a tent-like configuration.

This approach is simple and logical enough, but after spending a week with a Lenovo Yoga review unit, I think it’s a better laptop than it is a tablet.

The Yoga is clad in plastic, but it’s a soft-touch material that doesn’t feel like the cheap shells of budget laptops, and the area where you rest your palms almost has a leathery feel. Among Windows laptops, it’s the rare high-end design that doesn’t feel ripped off from Apple‘s MacBooks, yet its keyboard and trackpad are just as good

The trackpad is generously sized and covered in glass, so your fingers glide over it smoothly, and the entire surface clicks with ease. It also supports multi-touch gestures, such as two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom and the ability to simulate right-clicks by depressing the pane with both fingers. The Yoga’s keyboard is also a pleasure to type on, with island-style keys that let out a satisfying clack. One particularly nice touch is the rounded edge on the bottom of each key, which seems to leave just a bit more room for your fingers to land.

The display isn’t too chintzy, either, though it does beg for the occasional swipe of a cloth as fingerprints build up. Although some users may pine for a higher resolution than 1600-by-900, this pixel density strikes a happy compromise, where text is fairly crisp but the desktop elements remain large enough to tap on, should the modern interface of Windows 8 fail to suit your needs.

As for performance, the Yoga’s Intel Core i5 processor provides more than enough power for ordinary tasks such as word processing, web browsing and streaming video. It can even handle some newer PC games; I loaded Guild Wars 2 on it, and had no trouble adventuring through its massive world.

The Yoga does falter slightly on battery life, which in my experience floated in the five- to six-hour range. That’s not terrible for a laptop, but it’s far below average for a tablet. Unfortunately, any tablet based on Intel’s Core processors will have this problem, and the only alternative is to sacrifice processing power.

The bigger issue with the Yoga is its storage situation, as pointed out by the Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg and ZDNet’s Ed Bott. The Yoga uses solid state storage instead of a hard disc drive, so instead of having lots of space, you get much zippier performance. That’s a fine tradeoff in the age of cloud storage and cheap external hard drives, but the problem is that despite an advertised 128 GB of storage, only about half of it is available to users, and it’s divided across two partitions. The rest is gobbled up by recovery services, built-in software, the operating system itself and other mysterious partitions whose purpose is unknown. Users can reclaim some of this storage through an elaborate workaround, but that only underscores how bad the situation is out of the box.

Those gripes aside, Lenovo’s Yoga is still an excellent high-end Windows laptop. But its laptopness (for lack of a better term) is exactly what prevents it from being an excellent tablet.

My feeling is that if PC makers are going to put touchscreens on their laptops, they ought to at least provide some way for the keyboard and trackpad to get out of the way. The Yoga accomplishes this goal, but crudely. Hold it in your hands as a tablet, and you’ll feel the keys under your fingers.

In practice, this isn’t as bad as it sounds; the keys are disabled in tablet mode, and they’re barely noticeable when the device is resting on your lap. Still, the combination of awkward key placement, a weight of 3.3 pounds, a thickness of 0.7 inches and the jumbo 13-inch display can all feel like too much, especially if you’re playing a touchscreen game or propping the tablet on your chest for bedtime reading. You’ll hear the whir of the system’s fan the whole time as well.

I must admit that on a few occasions, the Yoga achieved hybrid greatness. The hinged design is so easy to flip around that I’ve gotten into the habit of switching to tablet mode just to read a long article — usually in portrait mode, like some futuristic broadsheet newspaper — or to scroll through Twitter. If I had this device for longer, I could imagine using its outward-facing screen to check recipes while cooking, or to play games while reclined with a controller in-hand. There’s something to this design, despite its flaws. Even so, the lack of Windows 8 apps so far holds the Yoga back from what it could become.

The question, then, is whether Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga is worth the price premium over other high-end Ultrabook laptops. The answer is only “yes” if you need to buy a laptop now, if your basic tablet needs are already covered by another device — say, the iPad or a smaller tablet like the Nexus 7 — and if you’re willing to gamble on Windows 8′s app situation getting better. Worst-case scenario, you’ll still end up with a great laptop.

But as someone who’s personally in the market for a new laptop, I’m planning to see what comes in the next few months, including Microsoft‘s Surface with Windows 8 Pro and other announced but unreleased hybrids. I’ve enjoyed using Lenovo’s Yoga, but this being a time of experimentation and all, I’m also anxious to see more results.

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Acer Aspire S5 world’s thinnest Ultrabook

The Acer Aspire S5 “world’s thinnest” Ultrabook measures just 15mm in depth at its thickest point. That’s 0.59 inches in old money. In comparison the MacBook Air is 0.68 inches and the Samsung Series 9 2nd Generation Ultrabook is 0.58 inches thick. Well, it seems like there’s more than one “world’s thinnest” Ultrabook around…

Acer managed to keep the thickness of the laptop down partly due to how the ports on the S5 are accessed. On the bottom of the laptop a panel hinges down to form a wedge(when a button is pressed), at the thickest point, towards the screen hinge, the ports are revealed and are accessible. Acer call this “MagicFlip I/O”. The action of this hinge will also tilt the keyboard of the laptop on your desk for a better typing angle, so it has a secondary ergonomic function.

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Asus Acer Netbooks End Life

The last two major netbook manufacturers, Acer and Asus, are closing the doors on these mini-laptops. According to Digitimes' Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai, Acer "has no plans to release more netbook products" such as its Aspire One, while Asus has already ended its Eee PC line.

Other netbook manufacturers, such as Samsung, have long since abandoned the market.

Why netbooks failed to catch on

Netbooks were "still enjoying strong sales" as late as 2010, according to an optimistic report by ABI Research. But the growth trend which it predicted flattened out and declined, thanks to four factors pointed out by the Guardian's Charles Arthur.

Not worth it for many, compared to notebooks

One is that the original, Linux-based netbooks failed to catch on, as they had trouble running Windows PC software. But Microsoft charged between $30 and $50 for each netbook's Windows license, and insisted that the new crop of Windows netbooks be larger and more expensive than the original Linux-based models. This placed them in close competition with low-end laptops, the prices of which were going down instead of up.

The rise of the iPad

The other biggest factor is that the iPad and Android tablets took the place of netbooks for many buyers. While Apple's iPad was the price of a full-sized laptop, the company soon introduced discounted or refurbished versions ... as well as the smaller, $329 iPad Mini, which doesn't cost much more than most netbooks. Besides that, the whole iPad line was even lighter than netbooks and had longer battery life, besides being more responsive and having more popular apps.

Meanwhile, companies like Amazon and Barnes and Noble made $199 Kindle and Nook tablets, which beat out even the original $249 Linux-based Asus Eee's price tag.

A little bit bigger, a lot better

During the netbook's heyday, many called for Apple to make one of its own. As Apple tech expert John Gruber pointed out, however, netbooks were "cheaper, not better," which contradicted Apple's business model of selling high-margin, premium products.

When Apple did release a small laptop computer, it was the $999 11-inch MacBook Air, which went on to be a best-seller. Other PC manufacturers tried to follow in Apple's footsteps with Intel's "Ultrabook" specification, which is basically a recipe for MacBook Air clones that run Windows, but so far have failed to make a dent in the market.

Taking the place of netbooks

Besides Ultrabooks, the other notable netbook-like computers on the market right now are Chromebooks, ultralight laptops which start at $199 and run a slimmed-down OS based on Google's Chrome web browser. Former netbook manufacturers Samsung and Acer are both making Chromebooks, while Asus manufactured Google's popular Nexus 7 tablet.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008. - source

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Lenovo ThinkPad X230

Design

Measuring 1.05 by 12.01 by 8.13 inches (HWD) and weighing only 3.39 pounds, the X230 is light enough to tuck under your arm or into a laptop bag, whether for a quick meeting out of the office or a convention requiring a cross-country flight. The rigid magnesium-alloy chassis is covered with soft-touch rubberized paint, giving the ultraportable the black, boxy look you expect of a Lenovo business system while keeping things lightweight and easy to grip. Despite having portability to spare, it still feels a little clunky when compared to a 13-inch ultrabook like the HP Folio 13-1020us .

Features

On either side of the laptop, you'll find a full complement of business-ready features, like two USB 3.0 ports, an always-on USB 2.0 port (for powering peripherals or charging gadget batteries), a card reader (SD/SDHC/SDXC/MMC), Gigabit Ethernet port, both VGA and Mini DisplayPort outputs (the later with audio), and an ExpressCard slot. Internally, the X230 is equipped with Bluetooth 4.0 and Intel's Wireless Display technology (WiDi 2.0), which lets you stream HD video through an adapter, like the Netgear Push2TV ($99 list). Security is also taken into consideration, with an integrated fingerprint reader on the palm rest, Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and an optional SmartCard reader on the front of the laptop.

Our ThinkPad X230 review unit offered 320GB of storage space, but can be alternately configured with either a 500GB hard drive or 256GB solid-state drive (SSD). Lenovo doesn't clutter the desktop with a lot of special deals and links to websites, but you will find that the hard drive has a few programs preinstalled on it. In addition to Lenovo's ThinkVantage suite of apps and utilities, you'll find generally useful programs and services, like Google Chrome, Evernote, Skype, Microsoft Office 2010 Starter, and a 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security. SugarSync provides the foundation for Lenovo's branded cloud storage solution. Lenovo's warranty is for one year, with extended warranties (two to five years) available for purchase.

Performance

Lenovo outfitted the ThinkPad X230 with Intel's third-generation Core i5-3320M processor, a 2.6GHz dual-core CPU paired with 4GB of RAM—although, like the hard drive, this varies by configuration. Intel's new processor line boasts better performance and power efficiency, so it wasn't a huge surprise to see the ThinkPad X230 top other ultraportables in processor-intensive tasks. It scored 3.09 in CineBench R11.5, and took 1 minute 35 seconds to convert a video in Handbrake and 3:37 to apply 12 filters in Adobe Photoshop CS5. This beats out the competing HP ProBook 6360b (CineBench 2.85, Handbrake 1:45, Photoshop 3:48) and the consumer-focused Editors' Choice Toshiba Portege R835-P88 (CineBench 2.75, Handbrake 1:46, Photoshop 3:55). Because it uses a low-voltage CPU instead of a full-fledged laptop processor, the Folio 13-1020us took 5:24 to finish our Photoshop test.

The ThinkPad X230 also promises improved graphics capabilities over the X220, thanks to Intel's HD Graphics 4000, the integrated graphics solution included with the new processor platform. In 3DMark 06, the X230 scored 5,118 at 1,024 by 768 (with no anti-aliasing) and 2,791 at its native resolution of 1,366 by 768 (with 4x anti-aliasing enabled). The performance was ahead of that of most competitors, but the Lenovo actually fell ever so slightly behind the Toshiba Portege R835-P88, which scored 5,142 and 2,827, respectively.

With a 63Wh battery, the ThinkPad X230 lasted 7 hours 45 minutes in MobileMark at 50 percent screen brightness, making this the one test where the X230 didn't meet expectations. It fell nearly an hour short of the times of ultraportable and ultrabook competitors like the Portege R835-P88 (8:40), the Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (8:40) and the HP Folio 13-1020us (8:47).

As a laptop for on-the-go productivity, the Lenovo ThinkPad X230 is an excellent performer, with the best productive capability we've seen in a business ultraportable. If your use scenarios don't demand high performance, you might benefit more from a business ultrabook like the HP Folio 13-1020us. But because of its processing power and its fine collection of features, the new Lenovo ThinkPad X230 replaces the X220 as our Editors' Choice for business ultraportables. - source

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