Lenovo is often perceived as a company oriented towards business users, partly due to their IBM history, and partly due to the ThinkPad series. Yet their IdeaPad series devices have been present on the market for some time too, a series oriented to buyers that value capabilities and an attractive price more than the reliability and portability of ThinkPad notebooks. The latest model that’s got into our hands is Y570, a very attractive and powerful notebook replete with new technologies.
Larger notebooks, such as this one, usually have a good reason to be as large – either they’re cheap, so cheaper manufacturing required a sacrificed portability, or they’re expensive and full of fast, hot components, which consequently necessitates larger volume of cooling bodies as well. The first contact with Y570 clearly states that no money or effort was saved in the design department, regardless of its final price, which you may or may not be familiar with.
Although well hidden by the choice of colours, both the lid and the section around the keyboard are made of aluminium, which promises a long-lasting and comfortable use. Both aluminium sections have a discreet relief texture, while the frame of the lid has a stylised edge in a different colour. Two JBL-signed speakers boast above the keyboard; they may not be very powerful, but they reproduce sound of amazing quality having in mind their size. Between them is the power button, as well as the most popular sensor buttons for controlling volume, cooling system performance and a few others.
Below all these, there’s a keyboard of solid quality, complete with the numerical section, which isn’t exactly a common feature these days. The touchpad is very large and comfortable for use, and it supports multitouch too, so that you can scroll or zoom screen contents easily.
The display is likely the weakest point of this notebook, or to be more precise, its resolution. Brightness and viewing angles are all decent, as is the overall crispness, but the resolution should’ve been greater, as a notebook of this size could easily accommodate for a larger desktop. This drawback has its bright side too, though, as with hardware this strong, nearly all games will work in the display’s native resolution and all the graphical niceties bumped up.
The edges of the notebook contain a plethora of connectors, and useful ones at that, such as USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and Power eSATA/USB combo. The video output can be transmitted through VGA or HDMI, while the audio input and output were made with particular finesse, with a metal ring around the edges. Expectedly, there was room for a memory card reader, LAN connector and DVD writer as well. The front contains two switches, one for turning the Wi-Fi card adapter on/off, and one for Optimus technology.
