benq-keyboard

The folks at Laptop Magazine have posted a full review of that BenQ Joybook Lite U101 netbook they picked up the other day. The mini-laptop is one of the few netbooks to ship with 1.5GB of RAM and one of the first to sport a true 16:9 aspect ratio, making it ideal for watching HD movies. But Laptop Mag gives it a sold “meh” when it comes to the keyboard and battery life.

The batter conked out at just over 2 and a half hours. And while that’s more battery life than I get from my cheap 15.4 inch Toshiba laptop, it’s not great for a netbook. The Joybook Lite U101 ships with a 3 cell battery, but you might want to wait until the 6 cell version is available if you want to get something closer to 5 hours.

The keyboard is also surprisingly small for a netbook with a 10.2 inch screen. As you can see in the image above, there is a bit of empty space on either side of the keyboard, so it’s surprising that BenQ didn’t make the keys a tad larger. The netbook also places the shift key to the right of the up-arrow button rather than the left, something which Asus and Dell have also decided to do with their netbook keyboards. If  you regularly use the right-shift key when typing, you might find this mini-laptop awkward to use.

The BenQ Joybook Lite U101 isn’t available in the US yet, but there’s a decent chance the company will begin offering the netbook here in the not too distant future.

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3 replies on “BenQ Joybook Lite reviewed, keyboard found wanting”

  1. That keyboard looks *exactly* like the one on my Lenovo S10. I wonder if there’s some “design sharing” going on between these 2 companies?

    1. It’s possible. Many of these computers from different companies are
      actually built by a handful of manufacturers in China, Taiwan, and
      other places.

  2. How can they offer this netbook with 1.5 GB of RAM and XP (in the photo) when Microsoft said they will not sell a license for netbooks with more than 1 GB?

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