Lenovo Ideapad 710S 13ISK

LENOVO IDEAPAD 710S – DESIGN AND FEATURES

This is a great-looking machine. Clad throughout with aluminium or magnesium alloy, it looks and feels every bit a high-end ultrabook. It can’t quite match the feel of being hewn from solid metal that the MacBook Air and Dell XPS 13 manages – because it isn’t – but it’s still a clear step up from largely plastic designs.
It’s incredibly thin and light too. Weighing 1.1kg, it’s a touch heavier than the latest MacBook (0.9kg), but then it does house a larger 13.3-inch screen and nearly matches the MacBook for slenderness, coming in at 13.9mm. It also comfortably out does the MacBook Air and Dell XPS 13, both of which weigh around 1.3kg.
 Thanks to the use of a very thin bezel around the screen, the rest of the machine is impressively small too, with dimensions of 307 x 214 x 13.9mm.
You miss out on little in the way of key features, too. There are just a couple of USB 3.0 ports, plus an SD card reader, a headphone jack and a micro HDMI output.
Inside you’ve got an Intel Core i7-6560U processor, which is a dual-core chip with Hyper-Threading so that it can process four threads at once. More importantly, though, it includes Intel’s Iris Graphics 540, which is a surprisingly powerful integrated graphics solution, making this tiny machine capable of playing some games. This is backed up by 8GB of RAM and a fast 256GB PCIe SSD.
There’s been no obvious cost cutting when it comes to the keyboard, either. It’s nicely backlit in white and has two brightness levels, as well as the option to turn it off. The overall layout of the keyboard is also excellent, with no squashed-up or oddly placed keys. Even the key action is reasonably well defined, if somewhat shallow, so it’s easy to tell when you’ve pressed a key properly – good for touch-typing at a decent pace.
 Sadly the trackpad isn’t quite so impressive. It’s nice and large, with a convenient click-anywhere, single-button surface. However, I found the pad had a slight tendency to stick to my fingers in a way that the very best – which often use etched glass rather than the metal here – don’t suffer from. This is one area where the Dell XPS 13 absolutely floors the Lenovo - it has arguably the best trackpad on the market.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ultimate Ears UE BOOM 2 Wireless Speaker

Image
The UE Boom 2 Wireless Speaker lets you make all the music on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch portable. The streamlined, 360-degree design pumps immersive sound throughout any space. Thanks to an IPX7 waterproof rating, versatile go-anywhere shape and 15-hour rechargeable battery, the UE BOOM 2 is designed to give you non-stop music, wherever you go. Using the UE BOOM app, you can even pair two UE BOOM speakers together to spread the sound and increase the volume. No matter how you use it, UE BOOM 2 provides impressively big sound for its compact size—sound that's rich and full across the entire audio spectrum.
Read more

Roberts R100

Image
WHAT IS THE ROBERTS R100? The Roberts R100 is a multi-room ‘base station’ that can just as happily be used as a simple DAB kitchen radio. Unlike Sonos kit, it’s not closed off from other devices, and doesn’t have to be controlled from your phone. It’s a meeting of the old and new(er) worlds of home audio. The Roberts R100 costs £249, making it expensive for a radio, but reasonable for a multi-room speaker with all the features it offers. Still, the  Sonos Play:1  sounds better. ROBERTS R100 — DESIGN Tech fans might find the Roberts R100 familiar. It’s the stylistic progeny of the  Sonos Play: 1  and the  B&O BeoLit 12  from way back in 2012. That last one is a lovely speaker, but at £600 has a fairly narrow, affluent audience in mind. Aiming right at the mainstream buyer, the Roberts R100 wants to replace your DAB radio and your hifi. It’s not quite as it appears, though. The carry handle screams “I’m portable”, but there’s no inbuilt...
Read more

Panasonic DMP-UB700

Image
  It’s still a very shiny device, still more premium-looking than Samsung’s UBD-K8500, but the nice glossy finish is now only on the front and top surfaces. The sides have a standard dull metal finish. It’s also a little shorter, because the UB900’s damping feet have been chucked out. On the front, there is a tiny display peeking out from behind the two-way mirror finish. It’s great that this feature has been kept, because it’s very useful being able to tell what the player is up to. It also allows the player to say hello and goodbye. Manners are important.   Like the UB900, the UB700 has UHD Premium certification. It pumps out 4K and HDR at up to 60 frames per second, and boasts a brightness output up to 10,000 nits. There is also a 4K high-precision chroma processor, and you can expect the player cover the BT.2020 colour gamut. The connections have been stripped back. There are no longer any analogue audio outputs, and no digital coaxial output either. What you get...
Read more