Lenovo IdeaPad U400 review

If you would like evidence that the Ultrabook fad isn’t impressing everybody, look no further than our inboxes. Quite a lot of of you’ve been inquiring concerning the Lenovo IdeaPad U400 , the 14-inch big brother to the IdeaPad U300s . And we expect we understand why. Starting at a more palatable price of $800, it offers the identical understated design because the U300s, except it brings a different inch of screen real estate, together with an optical drive and discrete graphics. The perfect of both worlds, right? Beauty and a bit more brawn? Not exactly. Though it looks the identical, the U400 trades various components, starting with the storage disk and continuing directly to the touchpad drivers. (Specs, schmecs, are we right?) So how much of a difference does this new set of innards make? Meet us past the break to determine.

Feel and look

Before we commence, let’s be clear on what the U400 is, and what it’s not. Yes, it’s has a similar industrial design because the U300s, and firstly blush it does indeed just like the same machine, scaled up in size. But make no mistake: the U400 just isn’t a 14-inch Ultrabook, and in case you tell yourself it’s you will be sorely disappointed whilst you lift it out of the box. Now it’s true, the concept that Ultrabooks must weigh lower than three pounds is bigoted — of course, we made an exception for the three.3-pound HP Folio , didn’t we? Having said that, the U400 makes room for a slot-loading optical drive, and is markedly heftier in consequence.

Make no mistake: the U400 is just not a 14-inch Ultrabook, and in case you tell yourself it’s you will be disappointed.

That is not to mention it isn’t a pleasure to carry, though. At 4.37 pounds (1.98kg) and zero.89 inches (22.6 mm) thick, we had no problem slipping it right into a tote bag and carrying it around on our shoulder — less shuttling it from room to room inside the office. It doesn’t have the identical wedge profile you will see on a whole lot of other laptops. Instead, Lenovo used good old-fashioned paper books as its inspiration, and designed the laptop in order that the head and bottom side extend a tiny bit past the edges, like covers on a unique. The result’s some razor-sharp edges, along the perimeters and front edge.

All told, the U400 is without doubt one of the lightest 14-inchers you will find. One exception is the Dell XPS 14z , but with a starting weight of four.36 pounds, the variation is de facto negligible. And definitely, the U400 feels noticeably less dense than either the 13-inch MacBook Pro (4.5 pounds) or the soon-to-be-discontinued 0 HP Envy 14 0 , which tips the scales at 5.7 pounds.

Beyond that, though, this is often, for better or worse, an identical design we first showed you once we reviewed the U300s. Like its little brother, it’s fashioned entirely out of sandblasted, anodized aluminum, and is supplied in a similar graphite gray (but not that rust-colored orange offered at the smaller model). That smooth material covers the lid, extending onto the palm rest, keyboard deck, bottom side or even the bezels. As ever, the metal lid picks up scratches easily, though it a minimum of does an excellent job masking fingerprints. Overall, we’re as smitten with the understated design as we were the primary time around.

Other charming details have carried over besides: a discreet, spun metal power button, together with equally low-key branding at the lid and corner of the palm rest. Lenovo also once more painted the Intel, Windows and FCC labels at the bottom side, as opposed to plastering the palm rest with stickers. There’s also that chiclet keyboard and spacious glass trackpad, which we’ll after all inform you about in a moment.

As well as that slot-loading DVD burner, Lenovo added an additional USB 2.0 port, bringing the complete to 2. Lenovo also added an Ethernet jack, while keeping the HDMI port, USB 3.0 socket, audio port and 1.3 megapixel webcam. Shockingly, though, the SD slot continues to be MIA. In case you never use yours, be happy to skip the remainder of of this paragraph entirely and meet us back within the section where we focus on the keyboard. But for anyone who takes lots of photos, it’s an annoying omission — why travel with an external memory card reader once you could just as easily discover a laptop with that feature in-built? For the reason that even inexpensive netbooks have it, we just don’t see an outstanding reason to depart it out.

Keyboard and trackpad

When Lenovo blew up the Ultrabook, it forgot to expand the keyboard which includes it. This seems like an identical, slightly cramped panel we tested at the U300s, that is a shame considering Lenovo had a bigger 13.4-inch wide chassis to work with. As with the U300s, the keyboard doesn’t come on the point of the brink of the deck — a waste, since every major key remains shrunken. The keys also are fairly travel, though they still have the ability to feel bouncier than other chiclet ‘boards we’ve tested recently (we’re taking a look at you, 1 Zenbooks 1 ). Even after several days of testing, we often stumbled searching for the Tab, Left Shift and Backspace buttons while touch typing. Similarly, the arrow keys are painfully undersized to boot. And while that will not bother everyone, it is a nuisance if you are the type of typist who prefers to spotlight text using the keyboard.

Also just like the U300s, this isn’t offered with a backlit keyboard. As always, this may not be an immense deal for every person, though it’s an amenity you can find at the Dell XPS 14z and 13-inch MacBook Pro. (Because it happens, we prefer these keyboards anyway because they’re better spaced with cushier keys.)

We do have some happy news to share, and that is the reason that the keys are each bit as sturdy because the ones you can find at the U300s (and each other Lenovo laptop, really). Once more, Lenovo went with flat caps rather than the scooped shape that makes ThinkPad keyboards so comfortable to make use of. And while that could disappoint the purists on the market, they’ve a pleasant, soft finish and emit a nice, low-pitched sound, even if you’re typing furiously.

Unfortunately, we do not have many nice things to assert in regards to the trackpad. And what a rude surprise it is, too: of course, it looks like the one we liked at the U300s. But as any geek knows, drivers are everything and the U400 we tested uses a unique touchpad supplier than the U300s we reviewed. This go ’round, it’s powered by Cypress, not Synaptics, and the end result, dear readers, is totally maddening. Though we stuck it out and typed a sizeable chunk of this review at the U400, we often lost patience because the cursor jumped to random lines within the document. Sometimes, the cursor went rogue even if we were just using the keyboard. Because it seems, you may press F6 to disable the touchpad, though we might have preferred that this happen automatically.

The U400 also runs into most of the same pitfalls as other laptops with giant, clickable trackpads. Occasionally, it mistook left clicks for right clicks. Two-fingered scrolling requires a touch pressure, but with a little bit practice, we were ready to carefully page through long Wikipedia entries and dozens of Gmail labels. Unfortunately, though, we never quite got the hang of pinch to zoom. This, too, forces you to bear down a little bit together with your fingers, but even while you master that motion the transitions are choppy, and it may be difficult to scale the text exactly for your liking.

It’s worth noting that as unreliable because the touchpad is, it supports any other, more surprising gestures. As with the U300s, you should use four fingers to open a master control window with floating aero cards, showing the entire windows and docs you’ve gotten open. Additionally, you may swipe left or right with two fingers to scroll through wallpaper, and move four fingers left or right to scroll between items.

Display

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The U400′s display is strictly what you’d anticipate finding on a $900, 14-inch system, that is to assert it has a reflective finish, 1366 x 768 resolution and limited viewing angles. With the laptop resting in your legs you will have pretty narrow visibility — dip the screen forward even just a little and it will suddenly become washed-out. Place it farther away, though — say, on a coffee table — and also you may have better luck. For our part, we were capable of follow in addition to Breaking Bad with the screen dipped forward slightly (but only slightly). Viewing from the edges is doable, too, though the screen darkens soon as you begin watching from an off-kilter angle, meaning some shadow detail goes to wander off within the mix.

Just like the U300s, the U400 packs Intel Wireless Display, a technology that for whatever reason isn’t that simple to locate on other laptops, although it has been available for just about two years now. If you’ve managed to flee all of it this time, here is a quick primer: Wireless Display (WiDi, for brief), allows you to mirror your display on an HDTV or monitor, and that comes with streaming 1080p video. To make this happen, you will need a small adapter (like 2 this 2 ) that plugs into your TV via HDMI. By now, we’ve tested the technology several times, both in its first and second generation, and we’ve always been impressed by how easy this is to initiate streaming, which usually entails pressing a launch key at the laptop. Typically, 1080p video plays fluidly, though you might want to keep your host laptop out of sight, because the notebook and television are frequently a minimum of slightly out of sync.

Sound

The U400′s twin single-watt speakers produce predictably hollow sound, courtesy of SRS, but unless you are a discerning audio snob, we’re guessing it won’t bother you much. Percussions and other low notes are inclined to sound subdued, but at the flip side, not less than, nothing ever sounds too tinny. Our biggest complaint was that the various music we sampled had a contained, distant sound. A shame, we all know: you actually Celine Dion’s rendition of “O Holy Night” to fill the room, didn’t you?

We suppose in the event you had the fitting PC handy for side-by-side comparisons the U400′s audio, as innocuous because it is, wouldn’t be acceptable. Lenovo simply hasn’t honed in on speaker quality the style ASUS did with the Bang & Olufsen-equipped 3 Zenbook UX31 3 , or the way in which HP does with its Beats-spangled laptops. Still, you can see worse audio in machines just like the Dell XPS 14z, whose sound gets buzzy and distorted as you crank the amount. Truth be informed, so far as audio goes there is not even that appreciable a difference between the U400 and a MacBook Pro, a machine that’ll cost you a minimum of $300 more.

Performance

We tested an $899 version of the U400, configured with a 2.4GHz Core i5-2430M CPU, 6GB of RAM, a 750GB 5,400RPM hard disk and two graphics cards: Intel HD 3000 at the integrated side and AMD’s Raden HD 6470M at the discrete, coupled with 1GB of video memory. Getting those raw numbers out of ways, it steamrolls the Core i5-packing Sony VAIO SB we reviewed a number of months back, or even lands in form of an analogous neighborhood because the Dell XPS 14z with Core i7. It’s much more or less on par with the entry-level 13-inch Samsung Series 9, which packs an SSD and prices $450 more. The U400′s 43-second boot time and 100 MB /s transfer rates are respectable, too, though hardly anything to jot down home about either.

Still, it is a far cry from what you will get from an Ultrabook — including the IdeaPad U300s. Though the U400 and its little brother both employ Lenovo’s RapidDrive technology, the SSD-packing U300s pulls off an insane 18-second boot, making the U400′s 43-second startup time seem common. And it’s going to go without saying that the U300s’ Micron solid-state drive runs circles across the Western Digital 5,400RPM HDD within the U400 we tested. Go along with the U300s and you will enjoy real-world read / write speeds of 250 MB /s and 200 MB/s, respectively. In the event you go for the U400 you’ll save yourself a number of hundred bucks, however the transfer rates will drop by half, if no more. And that is the reason not even coming into the truth that the U300s is thinner, lighter, longer-lasting and has a more reliable touchpad. Lets go on?

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Benchmark scores aside, its 5,400RPM hard disk didn’t stop us from multitasking, juggling email, chat, web surfing and a great deal of streaming. Like its brethren, the laptop also runs cool, thanks largely to Lenovo’s “breathable” keyboard, that’s designed to attract air in throw the edges and push it out the base. Also like other Lenovo laptops, including the U300s and last-gen 5 IdeaPad U260 5 , it makes good use of Intel’s Advanced Cooling Technology, which you will only find in Lenovo systems. The result’s a machine that stays cool to touch, even if you compromise in to long, full-screen streaming sessions. For us, that’s a relief, on condition that we have seen laptops get toasty once you stir up TweetDeck. Still, solid real-world performance means little when a flaky touchpad and cramped keyboard make everyday computing a chore. Go searching, even in Lenovo’s product line, and you will find laptops with smoother touchpads and faster performance which are simply more pleasant to take advantage of.

As for those two graphics cards, whilst you might assume they kick in automatically, reckoning on the duty handy, the hand-off here isn’t nearly as smooth as what we have seen with NVIDIA’s GPUs. To exploit out of that 6470M, you will need to open AMD’s Catalyst Control Center and manually specify which apps trigger which graphics card. A fun challenge for the tinkerers among you, but a pain inside the rear for the remainder of us who do not have much time to spare for tweaking.

Battery life

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The U400′s four-cell, 54Wh battery is rated for as much as seven hours, but in our (admittedly taxing) rundown, it lasted four hours and 18 minutes with WiFi on and a video looping off the hard disk drive. To be fair, we were ready to squeeze out in the direction of five hours of use when all we were doing was writing in Google Docs, checking email, talking in GChat and running the occasional web search.

That’s respectable for a 14-inch laptop, though we’ve certainly seen better. Take the Dell XPS 14z, as an example, which squeezes out another 25 minutes or so. In case you can accept integrated graphics, the Dell Inspiron 14z lasted greater than six and a half hours inside the same test, though even the 6 Sony VAIO SB 6 with switchable graphics managed five hours and alter after we flipped it to the facility-saving “stamina” mode. The sole recent 14-incher we will recall with worse battery life is the HP Envy 14 with Sandy Bridge, and that’s the reason about to vanish as HP 7 ushers in 7 new (larger-screened) models.

Software

It’s one of these relief to kick off the software component of a laptop review and never should rattle off an extended list of pre-installed programs. Indeed, the bloatware load is light and unobtrusive, with only a few innocuous apps on-board. These include: Google Chrome, Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft Office 2010, Windows Live Essentials 2011 and CyberLink Power2Go, Lenovo PowerDVD and YouCam webcam software, both rebadges of universal CyberLink programs.

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As with the U300s, Lenovo also threw in its Easy Notepad software — a sticky notes app that permits you to use three fingers to cycle through different scraps of virtual paper. As ever, we appreciate that the notes are all collected in a single place, rather than peppered randomly concerning the screen, and we also like that by default the stickies have different colors, making it easier to differentiate between different notes to self.

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Also on tap: Lenovo’s idiot-proof One Key software for backing up and recovering your data. And, like its little brother, the U400 has Computrace’s LoJack module in-built for you to potentially track and remotely wipe your laptop if it goes missing. Obviously, it’s as much as you to activate the service yourself, though the hardware component is already baked in.

Configuration options

The U400 starts at $800 with a 2.2GHz Core i3-2330M, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB harddisk. Like other IdeaPads in Lenovo’s stable, it is not configurable, meaning the specs aren’t negotiable (unless you need to search out an additional pre-built model, that’s). As well as Core i3 and i5, it’s available with a 2.7GHz Core i7-2620M. Dependent on the market, yow will discover configurations with 8GB of RAM and either 1TB in HDD storage or a 64GB solid-state drive. You simply get one choice so far as graphics go (ditto for the battery and optical drive).

At the moment, there are three models on the market within the US, specifically: that $800 Core i3 model, the $900 Core i5 configuration we reviewed and a much better-end one with a Core i7 processor and 8GB of RAM. This actual model costs $1,449 (or $1,299 on the internet), with a promotional online discount that brings the cost to $1,039 at Lenovo.com. If you have been being attentive, you will have noticed that though here’s the very best-end model available inside the states, it is not the foremost tricked-out Lenovo has to supply. Indeed, the corporate confirmed that the 1TB hard disk drive and 64GB SSD simply aren’t offered within the US, though they’re available in other regions.

The contest

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We get it: up to Ultrabooks make for eye-catching status symbols, they don’t seem to be for everyone. We all know 8 Darren 8 is not the only techie in the market reluctant to part together with his optical drive, even for infrequent backups. For those of you shopping for a light-weight laptop with a DVD burner (and perhaps even discrete graphics if you are lucky), you’ve a couple of options.

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9 Dell XPS 14z review 9

0 Sony VAIO SB Series review 0

1 Samsung unveils Series 7 laptops, we go hands-on 1

Starting with considered one of our favourites, the Sony VAIO SB series is our favorite 13-inch laptop with a built-in optical drive, though we adore it quite a bit it may well trump its 14-inch competitors too. Starting at $800, it offers a bright, matte display, impossibly lightweight design, solid performance, discrete graphics and long runtime, even without the optional slice battery. Step as much as the 2 VAIO SA series 2 ($1,000 and up) and you will get an improved-resolution 1600 x 900 display and a touch thinner design. Either way, these machines are highly customizable, with a Blu-ray player and sheet battery for those of you with additional cash to burn.

We even have a soft spot for the HP Envy 14 ($1,000 and up), though it’s soon to move bye bye because the company ushers in new, redesigned models, with the smaller of the 2 sporting a bigger 15-inch display. In the event you pull the trigger once you still can, the Envy 14 offers one of the crucial stunning designs we have seen on a laptop, at the side of discrete graphics and damn good performance. However, the display in this model isn’t what it was, and as you will discover, the battery life is even shorter than what you’re going to get at the U400. The alternative big trade-off: it’s markedly heavier, at 5.7 pounds, and you’re only getting yet another half inch of screen real estate in return.

The U400 is not only bulkier; it has shorter battery life, less impressive performance and a flaky touchpad, because of an entirely different set of drivers.

If you’ll recall, we also had a good time testing out the XPS 14z ($900 and up): its battery life is without doubt one of the longest you’ll enjoy on a laptop this size, and the keyboard and trackpad are remarkably comfortable to exploit. And keep in mind that this weighs almost almost like the U400, so that you won’t be sacrificing anything when it comes to portability (design, sensibility, is one other story).

To not be outdone, Samsung has the hot 3 14-inch Series 7 Chronos 3 , which costs $1,099. We are hoping to check this soon, but meanwhile, the 4.3-pound Chronos not less than matches — if not beats — the U400 on paper. For $1,100, it has the identical Core i5 processor and 6GB of RAM, inclusive of a 750GB harddrive, more powerful 1.5W speakers and slightly beefier Radeon HD 6940M graphics with 1GB of video memory. It has the next-resolution 1600 x 900 display and yes, it includes an SD card. Again, we have not reviewed it yet, so we won’t speak to battery life or performance, though it certainly looks promising.

And eventually, there’s the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,199. As always, several caveats apply: it is a durable, well-built machine with long battery life and solid performance (though it doesn’t have discrete graphics). Still, for the cash, you may want a display with more pixels than the 1280 x 800 this has to provide. You may also crave more ports than the Ethernet jack, Thunderbolt port, FireWire 800 and dual USB 2.0 sockets. And lastly, it’s heavier than the U400, VAIO SB or XPS 14z, at 4.5 pounds. It’s a fine looking, well-performing machine with a cozy keyboard and trackpad. Still, to the level that specs and ports are portion of the equation, it really is hardly a bang-for-your-buck sort of deal.

Wrap-up

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We all know what quite a lot of you might be thinking: the U300s looks nice, but you truly had your heart set on discrete graphics (you are able to take or leave the optical drive, we reckon). So that you figured the U400 would come with everything you really liked in regards to the U300s, together with a couple of beefier specs thrown in to make geek hearts sing. Wrong. The U400 is not only bulkier; it has shorter battery life, less impressive performance and a flaky touchpad, because of an entirely different set of drivers. If you are also considering the U300s, just take a deep breath, resign yourself to spending a couple of hundred more and decide that: it’s simply an improved deal, and when you were considering the U400 in any respect, then the U300s’ loss of an SD slot and backlit keyboard is just not a difficulty.

But when an optical drive and more robust graphics are key, you are able to do better than the U400. We’d sooner steer you toward the Sony VAIO SB series or Dell XPS 14z, each of which combine good performance, long runtime and sound ergonomics. (We’re optimistic about Samsung’s Chronos, too.) Heck, even Lenovo is able to something better.

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This post is tagged: best of both worlds, Big Brother, optical drive, real-estate, storage disk, touchpad drivers