The Mini-Laptops of Summer

The Traditionalists: Ultraportable Laptops

Compared to a mini-laptop, the full-powered laptops known as thin-and-lights or ultraportables are behemoths, despite weighing less than 3 pounds. On the other hand ultraportables are hardly experimental devices: They have a long history as the notebook of choice for frequent travelers.

The most obvious current candidates for best in show in this class of notebooks arethe  Apple MacBook Air and the Lenovo IdeaPad U110. Both of these premium laptops offer sweet and stylish takes on mobile computing and pack 1.6-GHz CPUs and plenty of RAM. But where's the optical drive? Like the mini-laptops and UMPCs we've discussed, these ultraportables had to sacrifice something to achieve the desired weight and screen size.

That's really the punchline for all of these machines. Each of them fills a different need for people who need to travel light, but they have yet to solve the problem of how to provide certain things that haven't gone out of style. For example, suppose that you want to install a program. Though USB flash drives continue to get cheaper, you'll still probably need an external optical drive nearby to handle big loads--and that means more gear to lug around. So much for shedding pounds.