We check out Lenovo's new mid-range consumer model, and test its Dolby sound and multimedia capabilities in our complete Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 review.
Review summary of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550:
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 The Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 is a nice, mid-range multimedia machine, and Lenovo even includes some nice extras if you want to customize your rig. Multimedia fans will appreciate the good, LED backlit display, which did a fine job with our movies, as well as the standard outputs for an HDTV, and the battery life that was strong enough to get through a long, loud action flick. We loved the deep, responsive keyboard that felt more like typing on full size desktop keys. Some of the extras fell flat with us, though, including the unimpressive "Dolby" speakers and subwoofer, or the time-consuming VeriFace logon. There was also plenty of bloat to slow things down or cause problems, and we wish Lenovo had focused on adding multimedia software instead of the wealth of security options. Overall, though, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 is a nice machine at a competitive starting price, and makes for a reasonable buy even with some serious upgrades for the graphics processor and system memory. We were pleasantly surprised with its performance from casual Web surfing to playing intense first person shooters. It's not as stylish as some other options, but it packs plenty of punch and makes for a solid device. Release: August 2009. Price: $1050.
Pros: Great keyboard. Solid gaming and multimedia performance with discrete graphics option. Solid selection of ports and hardware.
Cons: Big, plastic shell was unwieldly. Screen good, but could be better. Security bloat slowed us down.
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Full Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 Review:
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Design – Good
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 is a big, glossy, plastic machine, a departure from the company's sleek, understated, business ThinkPad lineup. The top of the lid is coated in a sort of textured, worn-looking pattern that's hardly visible except in direct light, and the black, glossy scheme is hardly unbroken except for a distinguishing band of orange around the middle. The laptop didn't feel especially solid in our hands. The bottom half would wobble and bend when we plied it. The top half required two hands to open, as the unlatched top was nice and stiff. There seemed to be a lot of give in the laptop case wherever we tried squeezing it.
Lenovo's style is a strange mix of seamless and completely obtruding surfaces. For instance, the trackpad is seamless against the bottom half of the laptop, with only a ridge defining its boundaries, but no gap. There are also touch sensitive keys near the hinge, including a "movie mode" toggle for the display, as well as a "Dolby" button that opened a faux-surround control panel. Too bad it didn't just toggle the speaker settings. Running the gutters of the laptop, however, are some bona fide buttons. There's a Power key on the left, along with a strange backup key that launches Lenovo's One Key Recovery (OKR) app. On the right there are volume and mute keys, though the same functions are duplicated as alternate keys on the inverted-T arrow layout. Most important is the touch sensitive strip for the Lenovo Desktop app. It's a very Apple-like dock that pops up when you touch the textured strip, and apps are selected by moving your finger left and right. It's a nice idea, and we had no trouble adding programs to the little dock. But the strip is placed out of the way, making it less intuitive, and the Lenovo Desktop app gave us trouble while running some other software.
Hardware Specs and Ports - Good
The hardware driving the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 make this device a solid mid-range, multimedia machine. Our test machine came with an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor at 2.4GHz. You can customize from the base Pentium Dual-Core option up to a Core 2 Duo P9600 processor running at 2.66GHz with 6MB of L2 cache. With these processor options, capable of running the 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, we'd also recommend springing for 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM. Paying to upgrade to the best processor is probably unnecessary for this machine's audience, but we'd definitely recommend buying the discrete graphics option, which replaces an Intel integrated graphics chip with an Nvidia GeForce G 110M chip. For only a bit more, you can also get the better Nvidia GeForce GT 130M with 512MB of VRAM, which is what our review unit was packing. With the extra graphics power, we were able to load up and play some of the most recent video game releases on the PC market.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 has a nice selection of ports and expansion options and nothing significant was left out. For simple peripherals, there are 3 USB 2.0 ports, and one of them doubles as an eSATA combo port, so you can easily add an extra external drive. For watching movies on the IdeaPad Y550's 15.6-inch 720p screen, there is audio output (and an audio input jack), and this port also doubles to handle digital audio output so the IdeaPad Y550 can act as a home theater hub for true surround sound. To connect the laptop to an external display, there's a VGA port for projectors and older monitors and a full size HDMI port for hi-def screens. There's no DVI output, but HDMI makes up for this video output option. For expansion, there's an ExpressCard 34 slot on the side of the laptop, and around front the Y550 has a multi-card reader.
Otherwise, the standard hardware options were pretty good, though not outstanding. Bluetooth is an add-on, though it's only $14 to get an internal Bluetooth radio. The screen only comes in one style, and that style is extra-glossy. We wish there were other screen options, but we do like that even the base model uses an LED-backlit display, which cuts power usage a bit and helps the environment by not using such harsh chemicals. You can choose from a variety of HDD capacities, but all of these hard disks are spinning at the same 5400RPM. It would have been nice to see a 7200RPM option as well.
Multimedia - Good
For multimedia fans, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 has an impressive array of hardware, but it did let us down a bit when we got to some of the advanced functions. With it's Dolby certified speakers and sound and its HDMI outputs, we devoted most of our testing time to watching movies. Movies on the Y550's 15.6-inch 720p screen looked pretty good. The screen definitely exposed some of the drawbacks of DVD media, and was capable of deeper blacks and better contrast than our test media could produce. Our review unit didn't come equipped with a Blu-ray player, but similar to the competing Dell Studio 15, the IdeaPad Y550 can be upgraded to sporting a Blu-ray/DVD combo.
For the most part, the screen was bright and colorful. It wasn't the best we've seen, but it did a fine job with our movies and video clips. There's even a Movie Mode touch sensitive button near the screen that switches the settings to a more dim and cinema-friendly mode. This helped a bit, especially since we had our settings cranked for eye-popping gaming graphics. There's a similar button for the Dolby surround settings, but this brought up a control panel, it didn't actually toggle settings.
On that note, we were quite disappointed by the built-in speakers. They managed a bit more volume than most speakers, but lacked sound quality playing back both our music and movies. There's a supposed 'subwoofer' buried on the bottom of the laptop, but we'd suggest not toying with it. In our test viewings of "Transformers" on DVD, the sound effects were grating and distorted. Perhaps these were more impressive than a basic set of built-ins, but they won't replace any external speaker set with real power and sound quality.
Productivity - Good
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 ships with a trial run of Microsoft Office, in addition to a wide assortment of bloatware that seem aimed more at small business users more than anyone else. We tried Office on the IdeaPad Y550 and it ran as smoothly as we'd hoped. Even better, the keyboard on the Lenovo Y550 was great. It felt more like a full desktop version than a smaller, thinner laptop keyboard. Keys were large and well spaced, with plenty of deep travel on each key to give a satisfying click. If you're used to typing on thinner laptop keyboards, you might need a few minutes to acclimate to the Y550, but in the end we liked the keyboard very much.
In addition to the Office trial, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 gets an assortment of software, some useful but some of questionable value. For security, there's ID Vault, which keeps multiple passwords locked up under a single code. There's also Carbonite, which is an automated, online backup system that offers service by subscription. Norton Internet security is also included. Lenovo even includes their innovative One Key Recovery system. Basically, your laptop arrives with a hard drive partitioned into 3 segments. The first segment is your system files. The second is the largest partition, for media and personal files. The final segment is hidden from view, and this backs up the system. If you need to restore the system, you can simply press the dedicated OKR key, and the Recovery program will get to work without disturbing your documents.
In all, we'd suggest you keep the OKR feature, toss the ID Vault and decide for yourself on Carbonite's value. Whatever you decide, best to delete the programs permanently once you're done with them, as the constant reminder and warnings became quite obtrusive.
Fun - Good
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 we got for review came loaded with the Nvidia GeForce GT 130M graphics card, equipped with 512MB of video memory. With this configuration, we were able to play any game we loaded onto the IdeaPad Y550. The latest versions of Crysis, Call of Duty and The Sims all loaded fine, eventually. At first, Call of Duty crashed every time we opened it, but once we tried disabling the Lenovo Desktop tool, we had no more trouble. After that, all our games opened just fine without disabling any other running processes. Games also looked very good on the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550. Graphics were smooth, and though we ran our games at medium effects levels, we cranked up the resolution as high as we could. Even at these settings, we saw great framerates and no lag at any point in our games. Online play could slow things down a bit, but this might have been more a problem with our online connection.
In addition to advanced gaming, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 comes with a 'fun' option for security, as well. The laptop uses Lenovo's VeriFace software for facial recognition. It worked well, perhaps too well. We changed the style on our beard a bit and the laptop had trouble recognizing us from certain angles. In the end, VeriFace wasn't faster or more convenient than typing a simple password, but it was a fun addition to show off to onlookers.
Browsing the Web on the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 was an enjoyable experience. We surfed around a variety of media rich sites using a variety of browsers, and everything worked pretty well. The trackpad on the IdeaPad Y550 uses multitouch, and we think it could be put to better use. The pinch and zoom methods and advanced scrolling techniques are available, but none of these were smooth and accurate. They certainly won't help you smoothly read through a long news story online.
Battery Life - Good
Battery life on the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 was pretty good. The 6-cell battery that came with the device, the only battery option, provided all the power Lenovo promised. Lenovo offers 3.5 hours of usage, and in a casual session of Web browsing, some music playback and Word processing, with power settings dialed down to a trickle, we got 3.5 hours out of the machine, no sweat. Then we tried playing through a DVD with a screen at more than 50% and a little volume on the speakers and the IdeaPad Y550 had no trouble chugging through more than 2 hours of "Transformers." We wish there was an extended battery option, as we'd like to see that casual usage figure stretched to at least 5 hours, but at a minimum we're always happy to make it through a long movie.
Value - Good
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 starts at $550, with a sale at press time. For that price, the laptop lacks some of the significant options we liked best, such as the improved graphics performance with the discrete graphics card. You'll also lose out in terms of RAM, HDD storage, graphics and processor, and we'd suggest upgrading those four to get the most out of this machine. The Y550 doesn't have an upgradeable display, so those who are looking for a 1080p display on this type of machine might want to consider the Dell Studio 15 in stead. At the end of the day the IdeaPad Y550 isn't a bargain, and it doesn't have the style of some competitor machines, but it does pack a solid amount of bang for the buck.
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