Lenovo IdeaPad U410 Touch Full review

Introduction
We first crossed paths with the Lenovo IdeaPad
U410 around this time last year, finding it to be a
very tidy little package, even if it strained the
Ultrabook name a little. Its mid-range price
belied some rather useful specs, though, such as
a dedicated graphics card and an uncommonly
large hard drive.
This year's Lenovo IdeaPad U410 Touch is
basically the same, but better, for the same price
- it's like the refreshes Apple does with its
MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs , but this is
actually more wide-reaching. The CPU is slightly
faster, the dedicated Nvidia graphics are
significantly more capable, the hard drive size is
boosted from 750GB to 1TB (in an Ultrabook)
and the RAM is up to 8GB. Oh, and the 14-inch
screen is now 10-point multi-touch.
Touchscreen laptops are more or less everywhere
these days, from the Samsung Series 5 Ultra
Touch to the HP Pavilion TouchSmart Sleekbook
15 - no matter the manufacturer, no matter the
spec, if it runs Windows 8 it probably has a
touchscreen.
So while the name
change from the
original Lenovo U410 to
the Lenovo U410 Touch
here might draw
attention to the
touchscreen, it's not
the special part: it's
everything else in it
that's noticeable.
And this really carries
through to the price: with a full recommended
retail price of £749.99 / US$1,049 (around AU
$1,225), you can already find the Lenovo IdeaPad
U410 Touch discounted to around £600 / US
$840 online, making the lower-specced and
higher-priced Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch look
less appealing in comparison.
That said, Lenovo has had to make compromises
to get this balance of specs and price: this may
still just about qualify as an Ultrabook, but it's
thicker and heavier than most of its thin-and-
light rivals. At 2kg (4.4lbs), it's a full third
heavier than the Samsung mentioned earlier, and
at 22.9mm (0.9 inches) thick, it's perhaps more
'quite-portable' than 'ultra-portable'.
In terms of looks, it's pretty much identical to its
predecessor, and similar to its little brother, the
Lenovo U310 , though less funky, perhaps. Our
review unit had a black lid and bottom casing,
with a grey keyboard housing. The build is about
as sturdy as they come, for the most part.
It's all plastic, though comparisons to Apple's
MacBook range are inevitable when you're
looking at it head on - the grey keyboard
surround has a kind of faux-aluminium texture to
it, and it has black keys and an all-black screen.
Though the design feels 'borrowed', it's been
borrowed well - the Lenovo IdeaPad U410 Touch
is smart, and wouldn't look out of place in an
office or at home.
Specifications
In the fairly samey world of Ultrabooks, the
Lenovo U410 Touch stands as a giant among
men. Well, maybe not a giant, but certainly some
sort of professional basketball player. In a mid-
range price bracket dominated by integrated
graphics and medium-sized hard drives, the
Lenovo IdeaPad U410 Touch's specs are
certainly worth raising an eyebrow or two over.
The processor isn't anything particularly
surprising. It's an Intel Core i5-3337U, which is
an improvement over the 3317U in the original
Lenovo U410 . As you might guess, the new chip
is a little bit better than the old chip, but it isn't
massively different.
Sadly, the new Core i5
processor isn't one of
Intel's new Haswell
generation chips; it's
Ivy Bridge, the previous
generation. Haswell
offers drastically
improved battery life
over Ivy Bridge, but the
U410 Touch has to make do without that.
What you do get is a 1.8GHz clock speed, rising
to a maximum 2.7GHz using Intel's Turbo Boost
technology. It's a dual-core chip, which is no
surprise, but it does feature Hyper-Threading,
meaning that it can appear as four virtual cores
(though this doesn't equal quad-core
performance).
As a newer chip, it's not something we've seen
in loads of laptops just yet, though it did make it
into the Dell XPS 18 portable all-in-one.
Still, when you've got the similarly-priced
Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D coming in with a
much older and slower Intel processor, the
Lenovo U410 Touch seems fairly well-stocked in
the CPU department. This isn't a processor for
high-intensity work, but it's more then enough
for most people.
The processor is backed up with 8GB of RAM,
which is another small increase over the 6GB its
predecessor came with. This again gives you
plenty of headroom for performance in Windows
8.
The tastiest part is surely the graphics card,
though. The Nvidia GeForce GL710M packs 2GB
of its own memory, and is a significant step up
over the GL610 graphics card in last year's
model. Though Intel's integrated graphics chips
aren't too bad these days, there's no substitute
for a real pixel-pusher, and that's what you've
got here.
It's not one of Nvidia's
high-end chips, it's
true, but it supports
DirectX 11, PhysX and
CUDA, so is equipped
for some pretty serious
gaming and graphics
app use.
The hard drive is
similarly impressive,
offering a whopping
1TB of storage. It's basically unheard of to get
that much room in a laptop this size, and it's
actually complemented by a 24GB SSD, which
enables Windows to load faster from boot or
wake.
Not being entirely SSD-based means that it
won't be quite as nippy around your files as
Ultrabooks that do have solely SSD storage, but
then, you tend to only get 128GB in those
machines - not 1TB.
The screen is a 1366 x 768, 14-inch affair. This
is bog-standard as these things go, really - there
are similar-sized laptops with lovely 1920 x 1080
screens, but they cost a lot more.
That said, there are laptops in this price range
with 1440 x 900 screens (such as the Samsung
Series 9), but considering the better specs of the
Lenovo U410 Touch compared to that machine, it
seems like a fair trade-off for the price.
As far as ports go, you've got a pretty healthy
collection, consisting of two USB 2.0 ports, two
USB 3.0 ports, HDMI video-out, a headphone
socket, Ethernet and an SD/MMC card reader. As
with most Ultrabooks, there's no optical drive, so
you'll need to buy an external one if you want to
load DVDs and CDs.
Performance
Benchmarks
Cinebench 11: 1.95
3D Mark: Ice: 43433, Cloud: 4023, Fire: 725
Battery Eater Pro: 153 minutes
We had high hopes for the performance of the
Lenovo U410 Touch. A fairly new Intel processor,
dedicated 2GB Nvidia graphics, SSD storage for
Windows and 8GB of RAM all together sounds
like a recipe for a surprisingly potent machine.
In terms of processor performance, the Lenovo
IdeaPad U410 Touch is actually a little on the
disappointing side, though. Its score in Cinebench
is normal for a mid-range laptop, but it should be
higher. The Dell XPS 18 runs the exact same chip
and scored 2.31, compared to just 1.95 here. In
fact, the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart scored 2.25,
and that actually runs the older version of the
processor in the Lenovo U410 .
So performance in the
CPU was a little lower
than we'd hoped, but
that doesn't mean the
end of the world. In
practice, it doesn't feel
like you're struggling
for muscle in day-to-
day tasks. It's only in
the more intensive or
professional tasks that
this discrepancy might be an issue, but because
this machine does tend towards being a more
capable Ultrabook, that's something to bear in
mind.
Of course, with a standard Ultrabook processor
but a meaty dedicated Nvidia 2GB graphics card,
it's games or other graphically-intense
applications that will see the biggest
improvement.
The 3D Mark results are strong, bringing it inline
with the Samsung Series 7 Chronos , which costs
£300 more. In more practical tests, we were able
to get 23 frames per second out of BioShock
Infinite with everything maxed out - that even
beats the gaming-centric Gigabyte U2442F
Ultrabook. When we dropped BioShock 's settings
down to 'High' we hit 52 frames per second, so
you're able to get some very smooth, very good-
looking gaming out of this laptop.
It even does fairly well for speed coming on from
sleep or wake - generally, it was just about ready
to go by the time we'd finished opening the lid
from closed.
With graphics performance to match the
considerably more expensive Samsung Series 7
Chronos and Gigabyte U2442F, you'd expect
there to be compromises somewhere, and it's
true that not every part of it lives up to very high
standards.
One area we did notice struggling a little was
network performance. Large downloads could
slightly affect performance (but nothing too
major), but more significant was when we tried
playing HD videos from a network drive - there
were major drop-out issues, with films frequently
stalling, then dropping the video and audio out of
sync when resuming. For reference, we've played
the exact same videos on numerous other
machines without issue. Playing an SD film didn't
have the same issues, though.
When we did a
speedtest.net check on
the Lenovo IdeaPad
U410 Touch and
another computer right
next to it (both over
Wi-Fi), the Lenovo
IdeaPad U410 Touch
reported speeds
noticeably slower than
the other computer -
9Mbps slower, in fact,
peaking at around 20Mbps instead of 29Mbps.
Now, obviously, 20Mbps instead of 29Mbps isn't
exactly a massive problem, and we have to say
that we didn't really notice this as an issue until
we started streaming the HD video, but later we
also had an odd drop-off in download speeds in
Steam (it having been fine previously). It's
definitely something to be aware of, especially in
light of its gaming credentials. It didn't give us
any obvious issues with online games, during our
time with it, though.
The screen is pretty decent, with movies
appearing crisp and clear. It is highly reflective,
though, and when you get a black screen in a
movie or game, you can see how uneven the
backlighting is. That also speaks to how it
handles blacks: not brilliantly, but still perfectly
acceptable. In terms of colours, they seem nice
and natural, if a tad on the dull side.
The display does wash out quickly if your viewing
angle is too high, and darkens if it's too low.
Side-to-side viewing angles aren't too bad, but
they're still not impressive. The resolution is also
fine for the price - 1440 x 900 would be nice, but
the lower resolution means you get even more
out of the graphics card.
In terms of usability, it's not bad at all. The
touchscreen is nicely responsive, as is the
trackpad. The latter is a generous size, too,
meaning that Windows 8's gestures were never
activated accidentally during our time with it, but
were still easy to invoke.
The keyboard is a tad on the small size, but is
comfortable to use. It's a shame that there isn't
much travel in the keys, but there's enough
resistance that you still get plenty of feedback
when you type.
Our only real issue with
it is that the case
under it bows when
pressure is applied.
When you're typing
very lightly, it's not
noticeable, but when
you're working fervently
at something long (say,
a lengthy laptop
review), it just feels off.
It made little difference to our typing accuracy,
so it's far from a deal-breaker, but it's not
exactly pleasant or ideal in a £749.99 / US
$1,049 (around AU$1,225) machine.
Battery life is another area where the Lenovo
IdeaPad U410 Touch disappoints somewhat. 200
minutes is what we're after from Ultrabooks in
our intense battery tests, so 153 minutes is on
the short side.
It's not catastrophic, but clearly the additional
power of this machine hasn't been balanced with
additional battery space. Perhaps a Haswell chip
would have fared better, but you'll have to wait
another year for that, we guess.
Verdict
The Lenovo U410
Touch almost seems a
bit too good to be true
on paper. Decent
processor, stonking
graphics, acres of RAM,
huge storage and an
Ultrabook frame... how
could such a thing only
cost £750 / US$1,050
(around AU$1,225)?
Inevitably, there are compromises with the
Lenovo IdeaPad U410 Touch, but not so many
that it falls too far short of our lofty expectations
to be worthwhile. Hopefully future versions can
offer better battery life and a few other tweaks,
to make make it properly irresistible.
We liked
The killer thing here is naturally the graphics -
well, the spec sheet in general, but the graphics
are the most impressive part. This really is a
gaming Ultrabook. Ok, it's not a high-end
gamers' paradise, but when you consider that
something more potent, such as the Razer Blade,
will set you back double the cost, the Lenovo
IdeaPad U410 Touch makes itself seem like a
truly impressive machine indeed.
It's also smart, wakes quickly and is comfortable
to use - Lenovo didn't forget to make a laptop as
well as a gaming hub.
We disliked
While we understand
the compromises that
Lenovo had to make for
cost here, that doesn't
mean we like them. In
fact, we dislike them. It
says so above. So yes,
it's a shame that the
screen couldn't have
been higher quality, and that the keyboard bows
in the middle. And while this is an Ultrabook, it's
only just - this isn't a super-portable laptop, no
matter how many of Intel's standards it meets.
The battery life is also disappointing.
That the CPU underperformed was a shame,
though, because it means the whole thing should
perform even better than it does, and the network
issues were also a little concerning. Most of the
time, they weren't a major issue, but they're
problems that other laptops simply don't exhibit.
Final verdict
Lenovo has produced a really solid portable
gaming machine, but it does feel like its focus on
a strong GPU, RAM and hard drive have taken a
toll elsewhere. The overall balance is definitely
still in its favour, though.
The final result may be more a light home
machine than a road warrior's ideal Ultrabook,
but this much power in this small a frame at this
price means it's hard to contend with - warts
and all.