Laptops Arena

If you are a person that cares a lot about the weight of a laptop, in this article you are going to read a couple of reviews for laptops under 4 lbs. We know that one of the most important things when you are looking to buy a laptop is the portability factor. Unless you are looking for a desktop replacement which is regularly huge and heavy, laptops and notebooks should be light and easy to carry around.

For instance, for less than $1000, you can buy the Asus UL30A-A1 which is a 13 inch laptop, both thin and light and with very good specs. The combination of black and silver make this laptop look very elegant and it will offer you a business-look. The processor is a 1.3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 which is very good news considering the fact that laptops under $1000 usually have Intel Atom processors which are weak and slow (these processor are often found in netbooks).  4 GB of RAM means you will need to use either Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating systems to get the best out of your laptop. The graphics card is somewhat disappointing because the Mobile Intel GM45 Express is not exactly top of the line material but we kind of saw it coming. Better video cards are found on powerful gaming laptops which are also twice as expensive. There is not much to complain about the design as this laptop does not look like cheap and the chassis is very solid. However, the keyboard tends to have a rather discomforting flex which is a common problem with these thin and light laptops. The battery is located behind the keyboard, between the two hinges that hold the screen in place.

Above the keyboard you will find the power button and another button that launches an Express Gate quick start environment which contains a web browser, a music player, a program for viewing photos and an online gaming portal. This application will open faster than it takes for Vista to launch.  The touchpad seems to respond well to multitouch commands. The page scroll works just fine and will be very useful for reading long documents and web pages, especially since the screen is not that big. On the bottom of the laptop, in the front area, there are 2 speakers located which produce decent sound even if we are against speakers places on the bottom of the laptop which normally sound horrible (by horrible we mean that they are not loud at all). You have 3 USB ports, one SD card reader, the HDMI and VGA out, the regular Ethernet port plus the stereo speakers and headphone plus microphone jacks. The unpleasant surprise was that there is no optical drive built-into this laptop. This is one of the things that makes this laptop lighter and you can always attach and external DVD burner to your USB ports. Another thing you might miss in ExpressCard slot but other than this, there are no major flaws with this laptop. One thing that will surely amaze you just like it amazed us is the battery life. Using video playback to drain the battery, the laptop worked for an astonishing period of 6 hours and 40 minutes. This is awesome considering that video playback is some that really wears out the battery. If you use this laptop for regular web surfing and reading or editing documents, you should get a couple of more hours of life out of the 8-cell battery.



We believe that the champion of laptops under 4 lbs. is by far the one and only Apple MacBook Air. It looks amazing, feels amazing, works amazing and it will make you look good whenever you take it out of your bag at the coffee shop. It weighs around 3 lbs. and it is the thinnest laptop alive. It operated with an Intel Core 2 Duo P7500 1.6GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM. You have 80 GB of available disk space and an Intel GMA X3100 graphics card. This specs are those of the unit reviewed, there are different models which are available even with nVidia GeForce video cards. Even if it looks so slim and fragile, the Apple MacBook Air is not exactly very "breakable". The 13.3 inch display offers good viewing angles. The keyboard dreamy and when you type on it there is a danger of falling in love and never wanting to replace this keyboard ever again. At first it may seem difficult to get used to the layout and to the spacing between the keys but in time you will find typing a real pleasure. The keyboard illuminates in the dark so you can type without problems and without having to turn on the light. The touchpad is a lot larger than what you would expect to find on a 13.1 inch laptop. The multitouch functions work just fine. You shall have no complaints about the speed of this laptop as it operates faster than you could have imagined when you first took a look at the specs.



If you use the wireless function to surf the internet and keep the display brightness at a low level, you should get about 4 hours and 20 minutes of battery life which is quite ok considering that some similar laptops offer a maximum of 3 hours. Unfortunately, the integrated battery means that you cannot have a spare battery that you can change if the original one dies on you when you are travelling. This is a huge problem for people who care a lot about portability and we hope Apple will find a way to fix this problem. The good thing is that this laptop works ok under Windows Vista which is a nice aspect if you are used to Windows operating system platforms. It's amazing how this laptop can be very solid even if it is so thin and light. One nasty thins is the fact that this laptop has overheating problems and if may even get a bit too hot to hold in your lap. The number and ports and connections is not sufficient for a 13 inch laptop and another thing we have to add is that the battery charges kind of slow so if you have to get out of the house with your laptop, we recommend you leave it plugged in for the night.