Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch review: A daily driver with all-day battery life

Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch $700.00 This is one of the most affordable Ultrabooks we’ve seen, and the compromises Lenovo made to get there are not showstoppers by any stretch.

If you think an Ultrabook is out of your price range, you haven’t seen Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch. Ostensibly designed for the consumer market, the U430 carries over many of the features that render Lenovo’s corporate laptops so appealing, including a rigid but elegant all-aluminum enclosure and an exceptionally good, island-style, backlit keyboard.

The dual-core Intel Core i5-4200U processor inside the IdeaPad U430 Touch is one of the least powerful members of the Haswell Core i5 family, but that didn’t stop this computer from delivering a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 199. That marks it as nearly twice as fast as our reference notebook, an Asus VivoBook S550CA powered by a third-generation Intel Core i5-3317u. Lenovo outfits the U430 with a typical 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch is nearly twice as powerful as our reference notebook.

Lenovo clearly had to hold back on some features to hit the $700 price, and the 14-inch display is one of them. The touchscreen panel is plenty bright, and it delivers very good image quality, but its resolution is limited to 1600 by 900 pixels. Still, that’s better than the 1366-by-768-pixel resolution that many of its competitors offer. Another drawback is that this computer relies on the GPU integrated into its Core i5 CPU, so you can’t expect to do much hard-core gaming: Among the five laptops in our testing group, the U430 posted the slowest performance on BioShock Infinite, even with the resolution reduced to 1024 by 768 pixels and the visual quality set to low.

Intel's integrated graphics processors are much better than the GPUs in its third-generation Core processors, but you'll still need more power than that if you want to play games.

The U430 is equipped with a 500GB mechanical hard drive that spins its platters at a leisurely 5400 rpm. A solid-state drive—or at least an SSD cache—would have produced much better performance, but Lenovo would have had a hard time reaching such a low price with either of those features. You’ll find two USB 2.0 ports on the right side of the computer, along with an SD Card reader and the power connector.

Battery life of 6 hours, 38 minutes is an impressive stat.

Lenovo placed the sole USB 3.0 port on the left side, along with a headset jack, an HDMI output, and a wired gigabit ethernet port. Wireless networking and Bluetooth come courtesy of Intel’s dual-band Wireless-N 7260 chipset (which also supports Intel’s WiDi wireless video-streaming technology). Stereo speakers on the bottom of the chassis deliver surprisingly clear highs, but they’re almost devoid of bass response.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch is on the heavy side for an Ultrabook, weighing in at 4.2 pounds, but it’s well made and very attractive, and its battery lasted for a full 6 hours, 38 minutes in our tests. It’s a terrific value at $700.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of the 5 best Haswell notebooks as of September 2013.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

HP Photosmart 5510 e-All-in-One Review: Nice Look, Nice Prints, Stunted Driver

The good news about the $100 (as of February 17, 2012) HP Photosmart 5510 e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction printer (copy/print/scan) is that it looks great in a small or home office, produces very good output, and is exceptionally easy to set up and use. The bad news is that HP has paired it with a feature-deprived driver that doesn't even help with manual duplexing. As James Coburn said to Mel Gibson in the movie Payback, "That's just plain mean." Not to mention environmentally irresponsible.

The Photosmart 5510 is like its cousins--the Photosmart 6510 and the Photosmart 7510--in that it provides a color LCD touchscreen with contextually lit buttons that you use to control the machine's functions. The touchscreen gives the unit a very modern look and makes it very easy to use.

Paper handling is rudimentary: A flip-out front panel reveals an open bay with an 80-sheet input area. Output falls into the same space, with a cleverly designed catch that swivels outward. There's no automatic duplexing, and there's no automatic document feeder (ADF) to go with the A4/letter-size scanner. The scanner lid doesn't telescope to accommodate thicker items such as books.

HP omitted a number of software features from the Photosmart 5510's driver. You can print and scan, but you can't specify layout options such as booklet, poster, or multiple reduced-size pages on a single sheet. Worst of all, this MFP doesn't support manual duplex printing. One round of printing the odd-page sheets in a batch, turning them over, orienting them correctly, and then printing the even-number sheets--will have most users ruing the day they bought this unit. On the other hand, advanced features such as push scanning (scanning to a PC using the printer’s control panel) and printing via email using HP's ePrint are included. Go figure. You may also print photos from Secure Digital or MultiMediaCard memory cards inserted into a front slot.

The Photosmart 5510 prints normal, single-sided pages quickly. Text pages emerged at 9 pages per minute on the PC and 8.5 ppm on the Mac. Snapshot-size photos printed to plain paper at about 4 ppm and to glossy photo paper at just under 1.9 ppm. Print speeds for full-page photos printed on the Mac were a little slower than average at 0.4 ppm. The Photosmart 5510 produced very fast, and very nice-looking, draft-mode documents. Scans were reasonably fast as well.

The Photosmart 5510's looked good when it arrived, too. Though a tad on the light side, photos had a realistic color palette on both plain and glossy photo paper. Text looked dark, crisp, and sharp. Scans had a slightly cool temperature and exhibited minor banding issues, but overall they were more than acceptable.

The Photosmart 5510’s replacement ink costs are about average. The standard black cartridge costs $12 and lasts for 250 pages (which works out to 4.8 cents per page), while the standard cyan, magenta, and yellow color cartridges cost $10 each and last for 300 pages (3.33 cents per color per page). The resulting 15-cent four-color page is a tad pricier than average. You can lower the color ink costs by using XL cartridges, which cost $18 and last for 750 pages (that's 2.4 cents per color per page--almost a cent per page cheaper for each color. The $23 XL black has a less dramatic effect on expenses: It lasts for just 550 pages and costs 4.2 cents per page--only 0.6 cent cheaper per page than the standard black cartridge.

Removing software features that already exist, cost nothing, and save time and paper is misguided--and that's by far the kindest adjective I could think of. Hopefully, HP will rethink this decision and I'll be able to recommend the Photosmart 5510 as the bargain it should be. In the meantime, I'll call it the Photodumb and recommend that you opt instead for a basic inkjet MFP that carries a more helpful, environmentally responsible driver--the Epson Stylus NX430, say, or the Brother MFC-J430w. Or check out the otherwise identical HP Photosmart 5514, which includes an auto-duplexer for only $20 more.

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