SmallBizResource Blog -- Hardware

Lenovo Refreshes Notebooks, Preps Netbook

Posted by Gayle Kesten Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 11:18 AM ET

While the rest of us were flipping burgers on the grill, Lenovo has served up a laptop lineup with price points sure to make many a small-business owner's mouth water.

Of the three newly bolstered mobile offerings, one, the $599 Lenovo G550 (right), is specifically being aimed at business users. Specs include a 15.6-inch display, up to 4 GB of memory and 320 GB of storage, a Core 2 Duo processor, GMA X4500 or GeForce G105M graphics, HDMI output and up to five hours of battery life with the included six-cell Li-ion. "Xavier" on Notebooks.com also praises the Vista-running G550's "dedicated numeric keypad, which is especially useful for users that have to punch a lot of numbers into spreadsheets."

But for me, the biggest appeal next to the G550's price is its weight: less than 5 pounds, which is at least a pound-and-a-half lighter than my current laptop, soon to celebrate its second birthday. I've been back from the National Small Business Week conference in Washington, D.C., for nearly a week now, and feeling has yet to fully return to my right arm, which bore the brunt of lugging that beast around.

A second new notebook from Lenovo (which last week announced a record loss for its fiscal fourth quarter) is the $649 IdeaPad U350. Compared to the G550, this consumer-spun model weighs 30% less and features double the memory, a 50 percent-plus boost in storage, and twice the battery life. What it doesn't have is an optical drive, but to me the IdeaPad U350 still seems worthy of small-business consideration.

Also now on Lenovo's plate, but not ready for consumption until mid-August: a new netbook boasting the graphics power from Nvidia's ION platform. The $449 IdeaPad S12 features a 12-inch screen -- that's a netbook? -- 160 GB of storage, and 1 GB of memory, and weighs a few ounces more than the IdeaPad U350. Of appeal to small-business owners who don't have the time to futz -- the machine offers a QuickStart feature that launches users directly into a Linux shell for a few basic needs (Web browsing and Skype, for example).

Hardware | Mobility | Productivity | SmallBizResource