Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops

AVADirect IFL90 - Thoughts and Summary

The IFL90 isn't an amazing notebook, but it's definitely not a bad notebook either. Like the overall design, it's a functional if rather generic laptop offering. The HL90 improves on a few important areas, but compared to the rest of the Centrino 2 offerings now on the market it also fails to offer anything truly noteworthy that you can't find elsewhere. The real benefit here is going to be purchasing a laptop from AVADirect with the ability to customize your component selections. We should also note that we didn't experience a single problem with the IFL90 during testing - no unexplained crashes, lockups, etc. AVADirect is also great in that they allow you to have a notebook shipped with no extra software installed, so unlike Gateway and Acer for example, on your initial boot you won't be greeted by several windows asking for your attention and half a dozen icons in your system tray.

As an overall package, the IFL90 is decent and we like the ability to get a higher resolution LCD on a 15.4" notebook. As you will see later in the benchmarks, this display is certainly head and shoulders above certain 1280x800 15.4" options, but it's by no means the best laptop LCD on the market. In particular, we would be interested in seeing more LED backlit offerings and higher color gamuts. We're also interested to see what happens when OLEDs start arriving on laptops. Samsung has a 12.1" prototype, but we're not just interested in ultraportable laptops with the technology. We want to see OLED in WSXGA+, 1080P, WUXGA, and all the other standard resolutions in small as well as large display sizes. It might still be several years before we see these displays reach the affordable stage, unfortunately.

We do have one complaint that we can level at AVADirect, that being the lack of warranty options. The IFL90/HL90 comes with a standard one-year warranty, and we were a bit surprised that AVADirect doesn't offer any extended warranty options for the notebook. What's odd is that they do offer extended warranties on most of their other notebooks, with the difference apparently being the notebook ODM. Perhaps it's Compal that doesn't want to bother with extended warranties, but unlike desktop computers it's not unusual to have notebooks experience difficulties during the first three years of use.

AVADirect is certainly worth a look if you're in the market for a new notebook - or desktop for that matter. Prices are competitive with other vendors, and they have extensive customization options. Customer comments at resellerratings.com are very high overall, and it's good to see dissatisfied customers getting responses to their comments. They don't have as many ratings as some companies, but they do have significantly higher scores than certain others (i.e. Gateway and Dell to name a few). The IFL90 (and by extension the JHL90) is an okay laptop, but having tested it we would be more inclined to select one of the other AVADirect offerings, if only for the longer warranty. With Centrino 2 models now in plentiful supply, AVADirect has quite a few options worth a look.