On a whim, last week I purchased this laptop from Lenovo Store. It's retail price was 52000/- INR, and I used a coupon for 2500/- off, and there was an offer running for upto 5000/- INR cashback on payment from HDFC bank credit/debit card.
It's a 14" laptop, and the detailed configuration is as below:
Processor
AMD Ryzen™ 5 5500U Processor (6 Cores / 12 Threads, 2.10 GHz, up to 4.00 GHz with Max Boost, 3 MB Cache L2 / 8 MB Cache L3)
Operating System
Windows 10 Home 64
Display Type
35.56cms (14.0) FHD (1920x1080) IPS 300nits Anti-glare, 45% NTSC
Memory
4 GB Soldered DDR4 3200MHz + 4 GB SO-DIMM DDR4 3200MHz
Hard Drive
512 GB M.2 2280 SSD
Speaker
Stereo, Dolby® Audio™
Graphics
Integrated AMD Radeon™ Graphics
Ports
1xUSB 3.2 Gen 1, 1xUSB-C 3.2 Gen 1, 1xUSB 2.0, Headphone / microphone combo jack (3.5mm)
Battery
3 cell, 45Wh, Upto 9 hours
Camera
720p HD with PrivacyShutter
Keyboard
Backlit, English
Wireless
Realtek 8822CE 11AC (2x2) & Bluetooth® 5.0
For the price, it's good configuration.
The device came up with brushed metallic finish in gray. The overall build feels solid. The display hinge feels fine.
I looked up a few videos on youtube regarding how to open it up and what are the innards like free ports etc. And I'm a bit disappointed, in that the 8GB RAM is max with current configuration. There seems to be some place for a HDD as well. Now I don't know the 500GB SSD that have is a NVME drive or a SATA. Not going to open till warranty runs out.
Anyway next part is first impression on few hours of usage. So battery is a bit smaller at 45WHr, screen is quite dim at 200nits max brightness, few ports are not perfectly aligned. The USB-C port especially looks like it will get damaged if somebody is to use it like it is right now. Screen angles are good, though below 50% brightness, it's unusable. The webcam quality is decent, and it has a mechanical privacy shutter which I'll ensure to use.
Touchpad is fine for touch, but the buttons are just meh. Charging brick directly has the pins like a mobile charger and so might cause some problems in some places where the electric board is crowded. It's a 65W brick and quite compact though. One biggest issue besides the non-availability of free RAM slot is, the exhaust of fan is routed to backside at the hinge towards right bottom of the display, so if you are doing something heavy, that area and your lap will get warm. It's not blistering hot, bit still something to keep in mind if it makes you uncomfortable.
The keypad's key travel is nothing to write about. It's decent, but not very good. Of course in such a compact setup, that's something which is sacrificed first - even though it makes no sense. I also hate that they have merged the up-down arrow keys, and no separate page-up/down keys.
Anyway since I wanted a compact 14Incher, I guess I have to put up with these.
Thankfully mostly this will live on a table with me typing using an external keyboard whenever I have to do a lot of work. So not too many problems there.
One more thing to remember is out of 8GB RAM, we get about 6GB RAM since other 2GB is reserved for graphics, and so if you want to run something heavier on memory, you will run into limits. For me though, this is not an issue - at least not for next few years. Maybe if it does become an issue, I'll be forced to replace the 4GB DIMM with a 8GB one. But that's far into the future.
So that's it for this review.. Lets see how well this one fares as years go by.
And yes now I'm going to sell the Lenovo G580 metallic blue now. Expecting 4k for that since it's so old.
Ciao!!
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