Otaku Gadgets

Lenovo is usually hailed for the amazing business machines that it makes in its ThinkPad series. However, ever since Lenovo took over from IBM they have inherited the legacy of boxy things. To be precise, their laptops are not the slimmest or the sleekest of the lot.

That is changing now. All you have to do is take a look at the recent T400s review that I did. They are also changing their ‘meant for business’ with the IdeaPad series. It is with these laptops that Lenovo is making forays in to the consumer laptops segment. It is from this series that we have today’s focus – the IdeaPad Y450. It is a 14-inch model that departs greatly from Lenovo’s usual serious designs. It is a sleek device with bold designer touches and gloss – things that are quite new coming from Lenovo.

Over all it is a good laptop with decent power and pricing. The only thing missing here is dedicated graphics or powerful embedded graphics. It has an Intel GMA 4500MHD chip onboard. There’s also no Bluetooth, which is becoming increasingly frequent in laptops these days. But if you are the non-gaming movie-watching type, you will enjoy the rest of the features on this laptop.

The Y450 has an attractive hex design on the outer lid with copper highlights on the edges and a glossy white palm rest on the inside. It does feel like plastic to the touch but surely looks quite good. So it is safe to say that you will like this new design.

From up front, the laptop looks quite slim but when you turn it to the side you will see that it is still a bit bulky. Nevertheless, it will never feel oversized or overweight when you are using it or carrying it in your backpack.

The screen is 14-inch (diagonal) and LED backlit. It has a 16:9 aspect ration with a native resolution of 1366×768 pixels. The screen is glossy but its inset position helps with glares. However, if you are viewing the things at an extreme angle, you will have problems with the color. When viewed directly, the colors are rich and text is well defined.

Below the screen are a few dedicated buttons and a touch strip with a speaker on each side. There is the power button, the OneKey recovery button for backup and restore and an LED backlit touch strip for launching Lenovo’s special suite of softwares. There are also touch controls for volume and Dolby Theatre settings. The speakers are from JBL and hence make for a very good listening experience when you are watching a movie or similar. It has a simulated surround mode, which makes movie watching a really good experience on this laptop.

Under the hood, the laptop is running a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 processor. A Penryn core would’ve been better here instead of a Turion core. But still, it provides good power without too much power consumed. On the medium configuration, you get 250 gigabytes of storage with a platter speed of 5400rpm. 7200rpm drives are better but this laptop is not all that pricey, so a 5400rpm drive is justified here. You also get 3 gigabytes of RAM running at 800Mhz. All of this runs on an Intel GM45 chipset.

The core specifications for this laptop shows that you can do pretty much everything you would normally do with your laptop including a bit of Photoshop and may be even use some (very) basic video editing, sound editing softwares. Multitasking would of course be quite smooth here and all your basic applications are expected to run smooth and fast.

On other hand, you can upgrade the RAM to 4GB; put in a fast 7200rpm drive and you will get much faster response times. Your system will also boot much faster. You can also choose to upgrade while buying the laptop. You have the choice between a Core 2 Duo T4200 and a T6400 processor, along the option to have a larger 320GB hard drive and 4GB RAM.

There are a sufficient number of ports on the Y450 for the average user. For an external display it has HDMI-out and VGA-out ports. It has the two usual audio ports for headphones/lineout and microphone/line-in. It also has a mini-firewire port, much like this Sony Vaio here, probably for the same set of devices. There’s an USB/eSATA combo, something that laptop manufacturers are using a lot recently. Apart from that, there are three independent USB 2.0 ports.

For further expandability you have ExpressCard/34 and there’s an SD card reader. The Y450 also features a DVD burner optical drive. On the connectivity front you have Ethernet and WiFi (802.11b/g/n). No Bluetooth, WiMAX or WWAN sadly but you can at least add Bluetooth in the highest possible configuration for the Y450 when you are buying it.

But even without those, this laptop has a lot of ports. It is clearly aiming at the portable multimedia entertainment market. It will have stiff competition from Vaio in this regard, but the Y450 has the edge with it comes to the price. Over all, this laptop has good expandability with the given number of ports.

Lastly, we come to the graphics, rather the lack of a proper graphics solution. The integrated Intel GMA solution is okay for normal video playback and may be very minor video editing. But for everything else, including playing proper games and video editing, you need a good graphics solution. You can choose the Nvidia GeForce G 105M, which is slightly better than what is bundled by default. But it is not a very powerful solution so do not expect much from it.

Over all, this is one Lenovo laptop that makes it to the non-gaming consumer without burning a whole through the wallet or looking too Spartan. It has good looks and a low price – starting at $679. It is $799 for the mid-range configuration discussed in this post, which is recommended for most users. However, if you just want a widescreen laptop with the basic features, you can get the basic model.