Lenovo U410 Long In Depth Review!!

SoftwarePro · April 28, 2013

So this review kinda came about a few weeks ago from a random spirit of enthusiasm First off i want to say this was written with one go.... literally no editing so yeah bad grammar, but i really dont have the time to edit it or anything but just wanted to post it so that maybe someone else could enjoy it! This is the 14" model BTW! Again remember this was written without ANY proof reading so this is not at all a grammatically correct review.

Overview:

The Lenovo U410 Is marketed by Lenovo as a mid-range ultrabook. Currently it is starting at about $750 (with a coupon) directly from Lenovo. You can buy it with configurations from 3^rd generation i5-i7, 4gb-8gb ram, 500gb-1tb HDD with a 32gb SSD cache (this is required to reach the utrabook specification if I remember correctly) Sadly this laptop only comes with 10/100 LAN which is disappointing, but I guess i cold always get an gigabit USB 3.0 adapter. All the new models from Lenovo do come with Bluetooth 4.0 (that being said my older model does not have Bluetooth) As for the physical specifications, this laptop is equipped with 2x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0, 1x headphone jack/microphone jack(they are combined to save space), 1x HDMI output, SD card reader. It also has a little button on the left side of the laptop that is a recovery button, I will explain a little more about this later.

Design and build quality:

This laptop has a decent design. From the outside it looks very nice, it’s got nice curves and doesn’t look chunky. But don’t get me wrong this is not the thinnest ultrabook on the market, and when you pick it up you will know it. The lid is a painted aluminum of some sort (not exactly sure what it is called) It feels like a mac book pro…kind of. It’s not a terrible fingerprint magnet but you can see some fingerprints after a while, they also are not the easiest thing to clean off because it is very slightly textured, the bottom is also like this. The finish looks nice on my graphite gray model, but I am always feeling like I am going to scratch it. On the bottom you have a vent that is about half a inch wide and runs about ¾ the length of the laptop, It is directly over the ram and PCB stuff, there is a mesh over it though so you can’t see inside the laptop unless you try really hard. Also on the bottom there is four very hard rubber feet, they are gripping but are not as grippe as I would like them, all of them come off except the bottom right one, which I think is held on by some VERY strong adhesive unlike the others which just kind of snap in and out of the bottom (they cover 3 screws that help hold down the bottom of the laptop, more on this later) Inside the laptop you will find what seems to be a plastic palm wrest….its actually hard to tell if its plastic or aluminum, but I think it is aluminum. The palm wrest runs around the whole inside of the laptop but around the keyboard there is a very noticeable gap between the palm wrest piece and the keyboard piece. Around the keyboard there is about ¼” of plastic that is separate from the pal wrest, this piece of plastic runs all the way around the keyboard and between the keys. It has a slightly different look then the palm wrest piece. The keyboard is a chiklet style keyboard, it is NOT Lenovo’s normal keyboard, they HAVE modified it…which I am not happy with, but we will talk about the keyboard a little later. The touchpad is a very modest sized touchpad, it is all one piece mac book pro style touchpad. It has a left and right clicking section. You can swipe across the entire surface of it even over the clicking regions. The whole touch pad moves up and down but it is much easier to click near the bottom of it near the designated left and right clicking area, mine when I first got it was nearly impossible to click right near the top, but now after some use it has gotten easier to make it click up and down near the top. The touch pad its self has a very nice texture, it is not glass smooth but it does not have heavy texture, overall it is very enjoyable to use once you get used to it(I was coming from an old dell xps m1330 touch pad is dedicated buttons so this was a VERY big change) The power button is located on the upper right hand of the computer and has a small dotted power ring symbol on it which lights up, the power button has very nice feedback and I have no complaints about it. The bezel on the screen is a high gloss finish (why can’t manufactures make these things matt gawwdd) and it is an HUGE fingerprint magnet, and reflects very easily. It scratches easily and had scratches on it after day 1 ) : Around the outside edge of the outside of the display bezel there is a hard rubber rim that runs all the way around, I assume this is just so make sure it does not damage is the age the laptop in way when it closes. Towards the far end of the palm wrest you will find the hinge which is also a high gloss plastic, because of this it collects dust very easily along with fingerprints. If you close the lid of the laptop and look at the laptop you will see a piece of plastic running around the whole laptop, its hard to explain but it is between the palm wrest/lid of the laptop and the bottom of the laptop. This piece of the plastic has the Power and battery indictors on it in the front. On the left side, starting from the front edge you have the headphone/microphone jack combo, then 2x USB 2.0 ports, then you have about a 1.5” gap and then there is the side vent which is but 4.5” long, after that is a small instant recovery bottom. On the right side again starting from the front edge, You will find microphone hole, SD card slot(with a filler card) 2x USB 3.0 ports, followed by the HDMI port, Ethernet jack, and finally the power plug.

Display:

The display on this laptop looks decent….although I don’t have any high end display hardware to compare it too. It has a resolution of 1024x768 so only 720P but with a 14” screen this doesn’t look that bad. The colors look decent; again I don’t have a great judge on this. If someone would like to add their input on this I would very much appreciate it. The display is NOT IPS so it doesn’t have great viewing angles but they aren’t terrible. As for the screen brightness, well it’s decent not as bright as I would like it though. I find myself having it all the way up all the time, even when I am in dark environment because it simply looks better. This being said this is where one of my biggest complaints is, unlike other displays I have used where you can turn the brightness down and it is still usable, but this display is not like that, I turn it down any more than about ¼ and it simply is hard to look at. I don’t know what it is but its harder on my eyes and looks terrible. The display is a glossy display as are most laptops these days. So it does reflect light decently well which I find annoying because my desk is right in front of a windows that has light shining through it ALL DAY.

Keyboard:

The keyboard on this laptop is my BIGGEST complaint. Since they made the touchpad so freaking huge they ran out of room to make nice keyboard. Everything feels cramped, now of course I am coming from my corsair k90….so yeah. But still this thing feels very cramped and has pretty much absolutely no tactile feedback; the keys do not have that much travel. The spacebar is too small, they have shrunk the right shift key to like half size along with the backspace key and the enter key. The left ship key is pretty much normal though. They have managed to put in a full row of print screen, Home, end, page up, page down buttons though along with arrow keys obviously. The keys have a slight curvature to them, but it hardly noticeable at all. On my model at least the keyboard has a nice give on the right side that is very noticeable when typing, now I have been accused of pounding on keyboard but this is still pretty bad and can be very annoying. Now I have been typing up this whole review on this laptop, and well after 1.5k words my hands are starting to hurt in the wrists, now I know I don’t have the best typing style but its pretty much normal. Another thing is that the sharp edge on the palm wrest can be VERY annoying if you do not have your hands situated just right, now I have very small hands so this is easy for me to do. But in conclusion for the keyboard it’s simply too small and needs some improvement. Just a note; The F1, F2 etc keys are not enabled by default but have shortcuts programmed by software.

Performance:

My laptop came with an i5 3317U running at 1.8 Ghz, it originally came with 4gb of ram but I quickly upgraded that (I guide is coming soon) it has a 500gb HDD with a 32gb SSD caching. Since it has SSD caching it took a couple days of good use for it to come to its full performance. The boots are now VERY fast, I would say normally they take under 12 seconds, and after login the laptop is pretty much instantaneously usable, but there is some lag. Overall day to day use is very good when using the high performance setting/Lenovo dynamic graphics setting. When using the power save or balanced setting there is a noticeable difference in the speed. I use chrome as my primary browser and I can defiantly see a difference in speed, the speed difference is also very noticeable when just using the computer for simple task, you can notice some lag here and there but overall it is not terrible.

Gaming performance:

I am not a big gamer but I do own a copy of battle field 3 and play Ghost recon online on a day to day basis. This section is going to be small until I get some more games to test it on. As for ghost recon online gets 60+ fps on high, but remember its only a 720p display. I do not play BF3 that much so I haven’t gotten around to installing it on this laptop. So once I had done that and benchmarked it I will post the results.

Benchmarks:

Well I havn gotten around to doing the benchmarks and I’m not really sure what benchmarks you guys would like me to do, so if you have any suggestions on what benchmarks you would like to see me do let me know via a comment!

Battery:

The battery life Is very good when just web browsing and basic computing tasks. I would say it does not get 9h like Lenovo claims but I am not sure yet because I have not completed any tests. But in round number I would say web browsing in balanced setting I get 6+ hours of battery life with the screen all the way up. If I put it in power saver and turn off all radios and say am only typing a word document I get 8+ hours. I havnt done any gaming battery tests, but let me know what you would like to see.

Software:

As with any computer form an a manufacture they always come with bloat ware. But Lenovo is normally pretty good with the amount of crap they put on their laptops. This laptop was no exception and came with I would say about 15 crap programs that no one needs and only slow down your computer. Lenovo does include some of their own software for graphics card switching between the onboard Intel HD 4000 and the Nvidia 610m. Along with some software to manage their shortcut keys. But overall the software that they put on isn’t a terrible problem and is easy to remove. Now for me I normally just re-install windows on all my computers and upgrade them to Windows 7 professional (technet subscription FTW)

Conclusion:

Overall I would say this is a very good laptop for the money. But a couple of things to keep in mind, the keyboard is not amazing, neither is the display. But the touchpad and build quality an A-. A couple of things i did not include are, the Intel WiDi, or Bluetooth first because mine laptop didn’t come with Bluetooth and 2^nd because I don’t have anything to test the WiDi on.

Pros:

· Low end price but midrange specs

· Decent build quality

· Long battery life

· 4x USB ports (2 of both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0)

· HDMI output

Cons:

· The screen is not as good as I would like

· The keyboard is sub-par

· No backlit keyboard

· Keyboard is cramped

· Display is mediocre at lower brightness levels