on November 4th at 8:33 pm 
Lenovo V100 Overview
- Pluses
- Great overall performance
- Great display
- Nice design
- Good connectivity
- DVD burner
- Great quality built-in 1.3 Megapixel camera
- Fingerprint reader is a nice addition
- Minuses
- Touchpad and mouse buttons
- Camera software
- Big size for an ultraportable
Final note
The Lenovo V100 is a nice ultraportable to give you the right quality and performance for the right price. And for this reason this is a good competition for every ultraportable on the market today. Nice computing power with a nice design and the optical drive are the pluses for this laptop. The touchpad, the mouse buttons and the built-in camera software are the minuses that can set back some of the potential buyers. As an overall, the money invested on the Lenovo V100 are well placed and you should have little second thoughts when buying it. Our marks for the Lenovo V100 are: 8 for design and 7.8 for the tech specs.
The Lenovo V100 doesn’t seem as solid and robust as its “brothers” in the 3000 series family. It gives you a little bit the feeling of fragility, but rest assured: the plastic it is made of is pretty sturdy and the cover material is a magnesium alloy. Just don’t try its resistance. The palm rest place of the keyboard deck has a little bit of flexing if you push it, but there is nothing to worry about. The curved lines and the rounded corners that are present on the other laptops from the 3000 series are also present on the Lenovo V100. As we have said before, in those reviews, we liked this design and we consider that it adds a plus of class and style to the laptop. Given the fact that the Lenovo V100 is meant mainly for the small business market, the looks of the notebook will give its owner the possibility to flash a good looking laptop when present to meetings and conferences.
The color choice (silver on the outside and black on the inside) of the Lenovo V100 is a very good looking one and it is meant to underline the affiliation to the business class of the laptop.
The Lenovo V100 measures 12 x 9,68 x 1,25 inches and weighs 4.4 pounds. This is a little bit far from the ultraportable concept. We don’t want to be misunderstood, the main goal of a laptop, portability, is very present on the Lenovo V100. It is just the fact that the laptop is a little too big for an ultraportable. But, you don’t give something for nothing. The Lenovo V100 has something that the majority of the ultraportables don’t have: an optical drive. And we consider this a big plus (even bigger than the minus generated by the increased dimensions).
Opening the lid, we can see the 12.1” screen in all its splendor. The Lenovo V100’s display is built with the VibrantView technology meaning that this is one of those great looking glossy screens. The colors are vivid, bright (could have been brighter, in our opinion) and the contrast is good. Viewing movies, editing photos and the PowerPoint presentations look amazing on this screen. As we said so many times before in our reviews regarding this type of displays: don’t orient the screen into direct light; you will get to see rather the reflections on it than the displayed images. The 1,280 x 800 pixels resolution is creating enough real estate on the screen and at the same time it is keeping the readability to a reasonable level. One thing that worth mentioning is the fact that you will get ripples on the screen if you press the lid; so, pay attention to this aspect. The viewing angles are average meaning that the horizontal ones are pretty good but the vertical ones leave you wanting for more; you’ll have to position yourself right in front of the screen to get the best results.
Above the Lenovo V100’s display there is a built-in 1.3 Megapixel camera. This is one of the best cameras we have seen mounted on a laptop. The pictures taken with it look bright and colorful, even when the shots were taken in a low light environment. When compared to other laptops’ 1.3 Megapixel cameras, one can see that this one can take the most out of the 1.3 Megapixel power. No hues, no noise, and the object outline is just perfect. The only thing that spoils all the fun is the BisonCap software that comes included. It is not user friendly and it eats up a lot of space on the hard drive.
The keyboard of the Lenovo V100 is full size and comfortable. Given the fact that we are dealing with an ultraportable, this is a big plus for the Lenovo V100. The keys are large, easy to type on and very ergonomic displayed on the deck, so you can get hours of typing without getting your hands tired or feeling any kind of cramps. The travel and the feedback are good. A lot from the ThinkPad series building technology has been used in this keyboard and this can be seen and felt. However, the Lenovo V100’s keyboard does not reach the quality and the feel of a ThinkPad. A little bit of flex can be seen on the keyboard (if you are the hard typing type) but there’s nothing to worry about.
The touchpad and the mouse buttons of the Lenovo V100 seem to be taken from somewhere else and just pasted on this laptop. Nothing from the keyboard quality is present here. The touchpad is not responsive as it should be, the cursor on the screen seems to have a mind of its own from time to time, and it just doesn’t want to point where you want it to. The mouse buttons are part of the same poor quality as the touchpad; they feel cheap and are pretty noisy when clicked (that is if you can click them because they are very stiff). The travel and the feed back just leave you with a bitter taste in our mouth. Consider investing some money on a mouse; you’ll so need it.
The loudspeakers are placed on the front edge of the Lenovo V100. They sound loud and clear. The sound is not distorted even at high volume. For a laptop this size, the speakers are as good as you can get (quite a little bit better, we must say).
The Lenovo V100 laptop is abundant in ports and connections for an ultraportable. On the left side there are a USB 2.0 port, VGA out, ExpressCard /54 slot (compatible with ExpressCard/ 34), a headphone and microphone jack and a FireWire port.
On the right side one can find a modem and an Ethernet port, an optical drive (DVD recorder), a 5-in-1 media card reader and a WiFi on/off switch and a USB port.
On the back of the Lenovo V100 there is another USB port.
The wireless connectivity of the Lenovo V100 is done via 802.11 a/b/g or the Bluetooth 2.0.
The Lenovo V100 is powered by an Intel Core Duo processor that speeds up to 2 GHz. 1 GB of RAM is available, but you can upgrade it up to 2GB. 100GB of data can be stored on the 5,400 rpm hard drive. The graphics are being taken care of by the PCI Express Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (not the best but definitely not the worst).
The Lenovo V100 battery lasted for about two and a half hours performing the usual tasks that one can do on a day by day routine. If you want to squeeze even the last drop of performance out of the Lenovo V100, the battery will not last that long; about two hours (tops) and the battery is drained.
Lenovo gives you an industry standard of one year warranty (parts and labor) and the battery has also one year warranty. The type of service is Customer Carry-in Repair.
Final note
The Lenovo V100 is a nice ultraportable to give you the right quality and performance for the right price. And for this reason this is a good competition for every ultraportable on the market today. Nice computing power with a nice design and the optical drive are the pluses for this laptop. The touchpad, the mouse buttons and the built-in camera software are the minuses that can set back some of the potential buyers. As an overall, the money invested on the Lenovo V100 are well placed and you should have little second thoughts when buying it. Our marks for the Lenovo V100 are: 8 for design and 7.8 for the tech specs.
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Helpful review but I need to know: Is the vibrantview display as good as the Sony Xtrabright??
Anyone who might know,.?? Thanks….