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.