Ultrabook For University

[Jordy0721]

Hi, I am looking for a touchscreen ultrabook to take with me to university which I will be starting at the end of September. I have a budget of about £600, but would prefer to spend less!

This is my list of preferences:

• A touchscreen
• An SSD or a hybrid SSD, at least 64gb of storage
• About a 13.3" screen
• Good battery life (above 6 hours would be nice)
• I am doing a computer science degree so somthing which has enough processing power for programming on with Java if I am away from my desktop.

Apart from that it will be used for email, internet browsing and general word processing.

 

These are some I have already looked at, if you could reccomend one or suggest any other that would be good. I like them all but at this price point the screens are not that great. I would like the Lenovo U430 which has a higher resolution screen but it is not yet out in the UK!

 

Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite

Lenovo U410

Samsung Series 5

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

 

[Samdb]

You aren't going to be able to get a powerful Ultrabook for under £600 I'm afraid.

[Anubikai]

im currently looking for the same, all the good ones ive seen are either very high priced or have something missing, like a good gpu, good cpu or are toofat, too heavy..etc.....really freaking hard to find one i like. Maybe im just too picky =/ ive found a couple, ill post them here if i can find the links again =)

 

-Anubikai

[Warcony]

You aren't going to be able to get a powerful Ultrabook for under £600 I'm afraid.

 

This.  You might be able to find a previous generation one on sale (ivy bridge) but it will have crap battery life.

[Jordy0721]

You aren't going to be able to get a powerful Ultrabook for under £600 I'm afraid.

I realsie I am not going to get anything very powerful, but surely even an i5 or the quad core in the Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite I linked will be enough for occasional programming use when I need it?

[rashdanml]

You don't need that much processing power for programming, unless you're doing some serious number crunching and iterative solvers with many data points (if the last bit sounds foreign to you, then you definitely won't need serious power for programming), and even then, any decent CPU can crunch a reasonably large problem in under a minute. Case in point, my laptop was able to run a MATLAB script that solved a 400-node Finite Element problem (simultaneously solving a linear system of 1600 equations) in less than 20 seconds, and it's a 5 year old or more dual-core AMD cpu (~2GHz, iirc).

 

Ideapad Yoga and Thinkpad Twist are cheap and fairly powerful ultrabooks. If you can find them in the UK. Lenovo's official prices are over budget, but you may be able to find retailers. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/twist-series/s230u/ Second from left for specs.