Lenovo Ideapad U330

The juggernaut of Netbook releases this year has in many ways, affected the 13.3 inch market which has seen very few significant releases. This segment has faced an eroding market share and this trend does not seem to be stopping anytime soon. Given their relative power-user/enthusiast levels pricing and the general slump in economies worldwide has also not aided this segment's cause. However, this has not stopped companies like Lenovo from releasing some updated models with good feature upgrades. One such release is the Ideapad U330 and this is the laptop we are reviewing today.

The keyboard area of the U330 is vintage Lenovo.� It sports a nice matte finish on toughened plastic, with small grooves on it that act as an sweat deterrent. The evenly sized keys are liberally borrowed from their business range� and offer the same level of typing comfort in regards to their feedback and positioning. The only downside was that, at times, we experienced keyboard lag while typing (even when writing this review), which would require a reboot to fix.

This problem popped up a few times leading us to wonder if this was a problem with our test piece and not a segment-wide problem with the model. Thankfully a careful search revealed the problem to be rather generic, which we were able to fix with a reinstall and a new series of updated drivers that we found via Windows Update.� Moving on we found the touchpad of the U330 is fairly well designed. It offers a decent working area for a touchpad on a 13.3 inch model, has sufficient traction for precise mouse control and two nice 'deep-click' mouse buttons that are very responsive.