Reception
Reviewing the LTE Lite/25 and LTE Lite/20, Rick Ayre of PC Magazine called the two laptops "state-of-the-art" and high-priced, with a good display and keyboard but with compromised battery life compared to their predecessor, the LTE 386s/20. The LTE Lites were the top-performing 386 laptops in terms of graphics performance and among the top five of 386 laptops in terms of rendering graphics within Windows. The magazine also rated it among the fastest in its processor class in terms of memory speed and data processing but found its hard disk performance mediocre. Mitt Jones, also of PC Magazine, called the battery life "somewhat lackluster" but praised the versatility of the user-definable power consumption modes and found the display bright and sharp with minimal ghosting.
Michael Caton of PC Week, reviewing the LTE Lite/25, praised its battery life, case design, ease of use, and keyboard layout. PC Week test lab compared it to Zenith Data Systems' MastersPort 386Le and found that the LTE Lite won out over the MastersPort under a stress test load: 3 hours compared to 2 hours and 11 minutes. Caton wrote that the power consumption modes were easy to configure. Similarly, the keyboard's hotkey functions allowed him to perform functions like disabling the external monitor or setting the speaker volume more easily compared to contemporaneous laptops, which required the user exit out to DOS and run a function utility. Caton called the case design "sturdy ... typical of Compaq notebooks" and the keyboard "well laid out". Caton found reservation with the keyboard's switches, which he deemed soft, and, the passive-matrix display, which exhibited ghosting most noticeably under Windows.
Andreas Uiterwuk and Siobhan Nash of InfoWorld, reviewing the LTE Lite/25C, rated the active-matrix color LCD well, with brilliant colors and a wide viewing angle, that exhibited no crosstalk interference patterns. The reviewers found the US$4,999 selling price "hefty" and found that it performed 9 percent slower than its monochrome counterpart but on par with its competitor in the active-matrix color notebook arena, NEC's UltraLite SL/25C. Nash and Earl Angus of the same publication, reviewing the LTE Lite/25E, called the laptop's $2,917 selling price "a pretty good deal" with its active-matrix monochrome display and equivalent processor to the LTE Lite/25C. Like Caton the reviewers found the keyboard too soft, the key travel too shallow, but they were impressed with its display, which exhibited "little bleeding".
Larry Blasko of the St. Petersburg Times, reviewing the LTE Lite 4/25E, found its relatively high price justified by its processing power, display, and keyboard and called the laptop overall a "first-rate job". In particular, Blasko found that the monochrome, active-matrix panel rendered "nice, crisp text and graphics" and that the keyboard had a "crisp touch" that held up under his heavy typing style. Blasko's unit scored 53.4 on the Norton index, meaning that it was over 50 times faster than a PC XT and 1.5 times faster than a 33-MHz Compaq Deskpro 386, which had a rating of 34.7. Blasko wrote that the LTE Lite was snappy running Windows 3.1.
