Now, I do mean what I said earlier--that the U36S's specs aren't the impressive part. In PCWorld's WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the U36S scores 114. That's not awful, but it's also not excellent--not even for the ultraportable category, which is notorious for sacrificing performance in favor of sexy slimness. The average World Bench 6 score for the past five ultra-portable laptops we've reviewed is 122, though individual notebooks scored considerably higher. For example, the managed a score of 144, which is excellent (of course, that particular configuration costs a whopping $2500).

The U36S's keyboard and trackpad are pretty basic. The keyboard features small-ish, chiclet-style keys, which are easy enough to type on, if a bit stiff at times. The trackpad is smooth and supports multi-touch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom, and has a wide plastic chrome-accented rocker bar below it. The rocker bar feels a tad cheap, but it's big enough and easy enough to press that I don't really mind.

The U36S isn't awful, performance-wise, it's just not near the top of the pack. Its graphics performance is pretty good for this class, however, thanks to the discrete Nvidia graphics card. In PCWorld's Far Cry 2 graphics tests, the U36S manages a frame rate of 45.6 frames per second. For the sake of comparison, the average frame rate of the five most-recently reviewed ultraportables for the same test is 39.9. Of course, the aforementioned Sony VAIO SB Series managed a frame rate of 75, but I repeat: it's more than twice the price of the U36S.

Thanks to the switchable graphics, multimedia playback on the U36S is good. It's not excellent--there's some blocky artifacting in darker scenes--but it's great for an ultraportable. The 13.3-inch glossy screen, which has a native resolution of 1366 by 768, is also a pleasure to look at. It's super-bright, which is definitely a good thing (after all, ultraportables aren't meant to be kept in the perfect lighting of your living room), and it does color and contrast very well. Occasionally scenes look a little washed out, but there's nothing that I can really complain about.

Sound on the U36S is another story. I don't expect too much from the speakers on an ultraportable laptop--they're usually cheap, small, and shoved under the chassis. The U36S's are no exception. The speakers are located on the bottom front curve of the chassis, which makes them difficult to hear if you happen to have the computer on your lap. And, well, even if you don't have the computer on your lap they're still pretty quiet.