In case The Revolution ever came about, one of the first things you might need is a dirt-brown notebook with plenty of battery life to accompany you to the nearest foxhole. Otherwise Nick Farrell might train his Dragunov on your shiny aluminium MacBook and you'd end up with bits of 2.5-inch hard drive and what used to be a 7.62 hollow point lodged in what used to be your spleen. Mind you, that's what would happen if you were on Nick's side, let alone if you were the enemy.

Lenovo understands this, so it launched an all-brown series of ultrathins based on Intel's CULV platform. Unlike most CULVs, Lenovo's U550 is a 15.6-incher, and it even packs a DVD burner. Lenovo also picked the right hardware for its new skinny beast. It packs dual-cores and dual-cores only. You can choose either SU4100 or SU7300 processors and you can get Radon HD 4330 discrete graphics, too. Depending on the SKU, you're looking at 250GB to 320GB of storage and 3GB or 4GB of RAM. Not bad at all, especially if you consider that prices start at a recession friendly $699 and the high end SKU with an SU7300 and Radeon graphics costs just $100 more.



The U550 is quite reminiscent of MSI's X600. However, there are still no proper photos around and we have no idea what the lid or its underbelly looks like. If it's anything like the U350, it will be gorgeous. Then again, if it's anything like the U350, it will sport a glare screen, which will render it useless in daylight and draw even more sniper fire in the field.

For some reason Lenovo is insisting that it features a Full HD screen, but it just doesn't. It's a 1366x768 unit, which means Lenovo's PR people will probably be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. The U550 might even deflect some bullets, as it weighs 2.4kg and packs a 6-cell battery.

Joking aside, this looks like a very attractive piece of kit. The specs are good, pricing is spot on and unlike most Lenovos it will look nice, especially in a different colour scheme. We can all probably guess the launch date, as it ships with Windows 7.