I remember the first time I had to buy a laptop a few years ago, in college. To convince my parents, I told them that I needed it to finish my assignments, do research work and basically everything ‘educational’. For the reasons I had given, a low to medium end 'lappy' would have sufficed. But the main motive behind buying a laptop back then was for watching High-Def movies and playing high-end games in my free time. Hence, I needed a high-performance laptop.

At that time, the term ‘Ultrabook’ did not exist – all one could get was either a high performance laptop which weighed a tonne, or a small, light netbook which could freeze while playing ‘Dangerous Dave’. Needless to say, I bought a laptop which had really good specs, but was nowhere near comfortable, while it was in my backpack. It wasn’t too light on my father’s pocket as well.

With the advent of Ultrabooks, the once-vast gap between portability and performance has been bridged. But somehow, the price tags still make a few consumers a little apprehensive. To tackle this, Lenovo has come out with a new set of Ultrabooks, called the Ideapads. One of the latest in this series, the U410, has been going through a plethora of tests with Smartbuy, and here’s how it fared.

Design

When I first saw the U410, I thought I was looking a distant cousin of the MacBook Pro. A dark grey aluminium chassis, and an island style keyboard laid out with black keys on a grey palmrest and trackpad gives the U410 a very 'MacBookish' look. But I’m not complaining, for the matte grey exterior along with the curved edges give the U410 a very premium look. The 14-inch screen comes encased in a glossy black bezel, and the chrome Lenovo badge is embossed on the lid. The power button, though placed on the left-had-side, looks very similar to the MacBook Pro’s power button.

Also, the wide and spacious palmrest is designed to be comfortable for long hours of work. The keys on the chiclet style keyboard give a reassuringly sharp feedback while typing. The trackpad is large and accommodating for multi-touch gestures, and is quite sensitive to taps and double-taps. However, one thing that was a let down was that the keyboard was not backlit.

The form factor of the U410 allows it to make space for a lot of ports and Lenovo has taken advantage of it and placed quite a few useful ports along the sides. A charging port, an Ethernet port, an HDMI out, two USB 3.0s and an SD card reader are nestled on the right hand side, while the left side sports two USB 2.0s and a 3.5mm headset jack. The left side also sports a one-key-recovery button. There is, however, no optical drive.

The speaker grille is hidden, underneath the chassis, and the exhaust vent is thankfully kept on a side (unlike many new laptops which have it situated in places where it can be blocked).

But there’s one thing that I didn’t quite understand – why has Lenovo decided to make this Ultrabook a bit of a porker? The U410 measures about 0.8 inches on the sides, which is much thicker than the MacBook air or the new Samsung Series 9. Also, it weighs nearly 2 kgs – light, if we consider other laptops with the same specs, but heavy considering the Ultrabook tag.

Tech Inside

Since Lenovo has pitched this Ultrabook for the higher performance category, the U410 is powered by a 3rd Generation (also known as the Ivy Bridge family of processors) Intel Core i7 processor, which clocks 1.9 GHz, and can overclock up to 3 GHz on turbo boost. For gaming and HD buffs, the U410 packs in an NVIDIA GeForce 610M 1GB Graphic Processing Unit (GPU).

The primary memory (RAM) on the review unit we got was 4GB, and storage memory was offered by a Hybrid option of 500GB on a SATA Hard Drive, and 24GB on a Solid State Drive. The inbuilt speakers support Dolby Audio, and the in-built webcam supports a resolution of 1 megapixel, with 720p video recording ability.

I wasn’t quite satisfied with the choice of operating system, though. With Core i7 and a GeForce GPU onboard, a copy of Windows 7 Home Basic doesn’t do justice to the brilliant graphics specs. On a system that can run some really high-end games, I would like to see at least some Windows Aero features.

Performance

The U410 is quite the performer, when it comes to entertainment. First up on the entertainment schedule was a Rocky movie-thon. The video, which I saw on full High Definition resolution, was very clear, and the frames were rendered quite easily. This wasn’t surprising, as this is the kind of performance I have come to expect from GeForce GPUs.

The sound too, from the inbuilt speakers, was surprisingly loud and clear. Of course, it didn’t have really thumping bass, but the audio output was enough to entertain a few people in a decently sized room. The battery, however, played a spoilsport as it got discharged in nearly 3 hours – that’s almost two Rocky movies, back to back. Having seen around 5 hours of battery runtime on Ultrabooks, this was another sore point with the U410.

However, gaming was a delight on the U410. I played Call of Duty – Black Ops for quite a few hours, and found that the graphics were not at all disappointing and gameplay was smooth thanks to the fast processing. The system also did not heat up too much at the end of several completed missions. The palmrest was mildly warm, and while the temperature at the base was a bit on the higher side it wasn’t near-scalding hot.

On Novabench, the benchmark test, the U410 averaged a score of 601, which is less than the Samsung Series 9’s 638, and significantly less than its cousin Thinkpad X230’s 676. The wake-up and boot-up times were quite impressive, though, as is the case with most Ivy Bridge processor powered Ultrabooks.

We say

The U410 is an Ultrabook for people who are looking for features and performance bundled in a stylish package and an affordable price. It might not be one of the sleekest or the lightest Ultrabook in its class, but it certainly has a lot of features that would keep a performance-loving consumer happy.

Love – Brilliant performance, sturdy build

Hate – Heavy, average battery life

Rs 63,990

sabyasachi.b@thehindu.co.in