Lenovo U460s Review

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Aesthetics

This laptop displays an artistic cover with a pattern of etched rounded squares in varying sizes in a brownish aluminum finish. The side with the keyboard has horizontal stripes etched on light aluminum finish. In both cases, the texture helps prevent finger print smudges from appearing. The laptop has rounded corners as does the touchpad and the indentation for fingerprint recognition. The touchpad has a textured surface but rubbing it over time erodes the texture. The chiclet keyboard has individually rounded keys. The Fn keys are easy to read in red letters and symbols. The screen has a glossy finish which is nice, though there can be glare when viewing it. The screen can also get dirty easily. Overall the appearance is minimalistic and sleek.

Manufacturing Quality

The quality is decent overall, but where the plastic frame that goes over the screen is a bit off in places and is not 100% sticking to the inner frame.

Over time the paint on the touchpad keys erode revealing the black plastic underneath, so if you’re a touchpad user, beware of this.

The aluminum body surface is nice as I haven’t seen signs of erosion with that yet.

Usage

The usage of this laptop is satisfactory overall.

The feel of the keys took a while to get used to as I was more used to the standard version. Also, the keys are a bit loud when typing. This is fine for the most part as it usually is not that noticeable.

The thumbprint recognition and face recognition features are nice for fun when logging in, though I prefer not to use them. The thumbprint recognition doesn’t always work on the first try, and glasses make it hard for the face recognition to work.

I am pleased with the speed this laptop. I can have Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator open at the same time with the browser open as well as other programs and they still work fine, though there is a little lag when loading a selected window.

There are touch censored buttons conveniently located for toggling between battery saving mode and normal mode as well as high performance graphics card mode (NVIDIA® GeForce® 305M 512MB graphics) and an energy saving mode. Also available is the toggle between mute and volume.

The rounded edges on the side with the keyboard and trackpad are nice as it doesn’t hurt when you rest your hand on the edge when using the touchpad. There’s just enough room for comfortably resting your hands when typing.

The touchpad is pretty sensitive. It took a while for me to get used to it being so close to the keyboard. Sometimes in the beginning, I’d accidentally touch it when I didn’t want to. You can use the touchpad for resizing the screen, scrolling with two fingers or with one finger down the right side. Two finger scrolling can be horizontal or vertical but one finger scrolling is just vertical. I’m sure there’s more you can do with the touchpad but I didn’t explore this further.

This laptop does not overheat, and has yet to randomly shutdown on me. For the most part it barely gets hot at all so you can use it on your lap. It’s also light weight compared to my old laptop.

The ambient light feature is nice as the screen brightness automatically adjusts to the brightness in the environment.

This laptop is also very quiet aside from the keyboard. This may be partly attributed to it lacking a DVD drive. You can remedy this by buying an external one though.

The battery can last for up to 8 hours in the power saving mode. Usually it can last up to 3-5 hours depending on level of activity.

The sound quality is nice as it uses Dolby® Advanced Audio^TM.

The viewing angle is wide and you can view the screen from practically any angle.

You can view more of the product’s description on this Amazon page.