Velocity Micro T30 Italia 13.3-inch Ultraportable Laptop PC

Sep 20 2010 - Velocity Micro's T30 Italia may offer much on the style front but it certainly lacks in the features and performance. Costing $999, it would be nice to at least see a dual core processor and a hard drive that is bigger than those found in netbooks. It is nice to see an external USB DVD burner come with the system but this certainly doesn't equate to the overall cost and performance differences between it and other ultrathin laptops available on the market.

Sep 20 2010 - Velocity Micro's T30 Italia may be a very thin laptop with just a .8-inch profile at the hinge but they sacrificed a lot of performance to produce this compact design. The system is based around the older Intel Pentium SU4100 single core ultra-low voltage processor. While this certainly limits the amount of power that it draws, it also limits what type of applications the system can handle. It will easily top a netbook but it falls well short of more affordable ultraportables with dual core Core 2 or the new Core 2010 processors. The 3GB of DDR2 memory combined with the single core CPU also limit the multitasking capabilities.

Storage features on the T30 Italia are certainly different from many other ultraportables. The big disappointment though is the hard drive with its meager 120GB size. This is smaller than many netbooks come with and provides limited space for users especially if they want to include digital media files. While the T30 does not come with an internal DVD drive it does come with an external USB DVD burner. This at least means users can load programs or play DVDs when they choose to take along the external drives.

The display of the T30 Italia uses a fairly standard 13.3-inch display featuring a 1366x768 resolution. As with many consumer based systems, it uses a glossy coating over the display that helps bring out the brightness and colors but adds a high level of glare and reflections. Using this laptop outside is difficult even with the automatic brightness adjustments. The graphics are handled by the Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics found on just about every ultraportable. It is fine for basic work and HD video streaming but lacks the performance for even casual 3D gaming.

Battery life is sacrificed on the T30 Italia in order to keep the size of the laptop down. Rather than using a more common six cell battery pack, it comes equipped with a four cell model. This reduction in power means that it isn't going to last quite as long as many other ultraportables. In DVD playback tests with the external DVD drive, the system was able to run for two and three quarter hours. More typical usage should yield about four hours. This is much lower than many similarly priced ultraportables and prevents it from being an all-day computer.

What hurts the T30 Italia the most is the price. With a base price of $999, it is certainly a fairly expensive option for an ultraportable. It is possible to get less expensive models from Acer or ASUS or even a similarly priced MSI unit that all provide roughly the same level of portability with more features save the external USB drive. Considering these can be purchased for around $40, that isn't really that big of a feature for the T30 to have over them.