Lenovo broke into the consumer laptop market with the IdeaPad Y510 and now ushers in a unique, attractive design that’s one of the top systems in its class with the 16-inch Y650. At $1,399, this machine lacks certain refinements that its pricier competitors have, such as screaming graphics performance and an edge-to-edge glass display, but it more than compensates with strong overall performance, thunderous speakers, and unique face-detection software.
Design
The Y650’s design is a departure from the Y510. It has shed the latter system’s plain black looks for a matte black lid, glossy white interior, and copper accents. The new design won’t please everyone, but the majority of onlookers found its appearance sleek and attractive, and there’s something to be said for being one of a kind.
At 15.4 x 10.2 x 1.0 inches, the Y650 is one of the thinnest 16-inch systems on the market. According to Lenovo, it’s also one of the lightest, at 5.6 pounds, owing to the use of carbon fiber in the chassis. That’s impressive when you consider that the HP Pavilion dv5, a 15.4-inch system, weighs 6.4 pounds. Indeed, shuttling the Y650 from one room to another was easy.
The lid has a textured yet satiny feel, and doesn’t pick up any fingerprints. In addition to characters on the keyboard, the copper accents come in the form of a metallic strip framing the lid and chassis. The lid bears Lenovo’s logo stamped in metal, while the lower right corner of the palm rest sports the IdeaPad logo, which glows bluish white when the machine is on.
Above the keyboard are touch-sensitive controls. These include touch buttons for Dolby Control Center (for tweaking audio settings) and OneKey Theater Software (for switching between movie mode and normal mode). There are status lights for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and AC power.
A narrow touch strip controls an onscreen, pop-up dashboard. The shortcuts here include EasyCapture (webcam software), ReadyComm 4.0 (Web conferencing), VeriFace (face recognition), and OneKey 6.0 recovery software. Run your finger back and forth over the strip to select a program, and then tap the strip to select it. This implementation was a bit awkward; dedicated buttons would have been preferable. We also wish that you could personalize this menu with shortcuts to your favorite applications, similar to the Dell Dock on many of its newer notebooks.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The keyboard is set well back on the chassis, leaving room for an extra wide palm rest, as well as a large touchpad and buttons. This arrangement presents a couple of issues, but neither are deal breakers. First, the layout is not centered vertically on the keyboard deck; having to crane our hands over so much blank space was uncomfortable. Second, because the keyboard is flanked by the power button on the left and volume controls on the right, the layout is a bit scrunched horizontally, resulting in some shrunken keys (especially the Tab, Backspace, and right Shift keys). However, the keys themselves felt sturdy, and they had a soft but not slippery finish, and didn’t make much noise. The overall typing experience is close to ThinkPad quality.
The trackpad is 4.4 x 2.5 inches, which Lenovo claims is the largest on any notebook. We love the tiny grid of dots, which give it a subtle, textured feel. A scroll strip runs along the right side; as we dragged our finger over it (we had to apply a bit more pressure than we would on other gesture-enabled trackpads) the page scrolled in small increments, which made continuous reading easy. Oddly, Lenovo only implemented Synaptics’ Pinch to Zoom gesture, and not others like Rotate or Two-Finger Flick.
