Lenovo Ideapad Y430 Review: Stylish & Rich-in-features Laptop

The new IdeaPad line of laptops from Lenovo, Lenovo Ideapad Y430, is known for its stylish, chic and rich-in-features notebooks. This is Lenovo’s first Centrino 2-based notebook and has been optimized to claim a rank amongst the bests of midsized laptops present in the market today.

Build & design

The bodily design of Lenovo Ideapad Y430 is smart, with a textured finish ornamental lift-up lid. Like other ThinkPads, it has a glossy protective coating on the screen. The entire notebook is well configured and its case is very firm. Its exterior has an etched Red or Black Light tendril weave design and weighs about 5.2 lbs.

Display

The Ideapad Y430 comes with a 14.1″ WXGA LCD screen with the glossy type anti-glare coating on its surface. It has a high contrast ratio and brightness and sufficiently wide viewing angles. Therefore, watching movies on the 14.1″ LCD screen is an enjoyable experience. However, the screen has a resolution of 1280×800 only. Apart from this little limitation, this laptop has all the essential features to drive an external display or secondary monitor at a full HD resolution.

Keyboard and touch pad

Lenovo Ideapad Y430 has one of the best keyboards one could ever come across. With full-sized keys which are sturdy and ready to bounce-back crisply we cannot complain much about it. Across the spacious panel over the keyboard, there are touch-responsive shortcut buttons to control media. The only inconvenience that may be encountered is that the Delete and Control keys aren’t positioned in the usual lower corners but rather pushed 2-3 keys inside. That would require some getting used to. The touchpad is slippery, contributing zero friction to your finger while you drive the cursor on the screen. Its accuracy is simply marvelous. It does not fall a prey of indiscretion of single and double-clicks. Both the mouse buttons are soft and easy to use. The palm-rest area is more than abundant.

Performance and Benchmarks

Lenovo Ideapad Y430 is built to manage every task from office applications to high-end 3D animation projects. Memory is adequate to run Windows Vista Home hassle free the graphics system may not give superior results for latest NVIDIA supported games, but that is a compromise you can make. Wireless connectivity is good and it can connect up to 5GHz routers. It has Bluetooth 2.0 integrated.

The One-touch Recovery utility of Lenovo Ideapad Y430 allows the user to create a backup of the system and save to external storage in as less as1 hr time. However, since it has a 250GB hard disk, partitioned into a 187GB system drive and two 30GB secondary drives, you will require large external storage devices to be able to make use of this feature. The webcam and VeriFace Recognition is just as good as that in ThinkPads. However both require well lit ambience to deliver optimum performance.

Battery

Lenovo Ideapad Y430 uses the Centrino 2 technology, which includes the Dual Core T3400 CPU running at 2.16 GHz and is based 45nm (nanometer) transistor technology. This indicates that it shouldn’t heat up and can be called power efficient. The 57Wh (Watt hour) battery has been observed to last for two hours, when put on a looped DVD video, before the battery low alarm goes off. Also for new users the alarm may be a trouble to take care of.

Specifications of Lenovo IdeaPad Y430

Processor: Pentium Dual Core, T3400 2.16 -Ghz processor from Intel

OS: Genuine Microsoft Windows Vista Premium

Memory: 2-GB DDR3

Display: 14.1-inch WXGA, 1280×800

Hard drive: 160GB SATA (5400 rpm)

Battery: 6-cell lithium-ion

Weight: starting from 5.2 lbs

Pros: excellent battery life, brilliant design and large hard drive

Cons: Hard disk drive memory is less and would be better at 7200 rpm

MSRP: $589 (base price)