Quick Darter UltraThin Review

[niteflier]

I suppose the i5 would have a better battery life.

Doubt it. I got the i5 powered version and battery life is not good. I get maybe two hours out of it. Granted, the brightness is turned up to a comfortable level, but my cheap old Acer did just as well.

The 1080 display is crisp and nice for looking at pictures, but text is so small that I find it unusable. I have yet to find any zoom feature to make everything uniformly larger. The easiest solution seems to be to set screen resolution to 1366x768, which totally defeats the purpose of a high resolution screen.

The touch screen is of very limited use. Only a few obscure gestures are recognized. Even pointing and clicking is frustrating as it is hard to hit the right pixel with a fat finger, especially when the icons or buttons are as small as they are at default resolution.

Guess this is the price of being on the cutting edge. Just hope that software support arrives before this thing is obsolete.

[gvlists]

Battery life is a deal breaker for me. I am surprised at the number from Darter. Galago has i7-4750HQ (TDP 47W) and 53Wh battery. Darter has i7-4500U processor and 43Wh battery (TDP is 15W or so). Similar speced Lenovo T440s with i7-4500U/46Wh battery is claiming 8 hours. I do not believe their claim. Still there is an option to upgrade to almost 100 Wh battery at an extra $5. That is a much better deal for me than going for a sealed battery from System76. Besides in a few years time, there is good chance that I can get a Lenovo replacement battery from ebay. I do not need touch screen. Had System 76 provided a Galago with i7-4500U and bigger battery I would have bought it. I am not worried about the iris pro graphics. 2 hour battery life means the laptop is heavier by half a kilogram with the PSU.

[HandeH]

Also known as Clevo W840SU, Schenker S403, Nexoc B401, Sager NP2840, Tuxedo book UC1402 (the touch screen model is UT1402). Has a horrific touchpad / trackpad and a terrible keyboard. Note, on the contrary that has been marketed the case is plastic! Only the back side of the display has a metal plate (recently this has been corrected to marketing texts and renaming it as UC1403 for example).