Lenovo IdeaPad Y510

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 eschews the soft round edges and light colors of other 15 inch consumer laptops, such as the Dell Inspiron 1525, for a matte black finish and boxy shape. It feels solid and well built, if a little on the heavy side, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Dell 1525 is lighter but feels much flimsier. This still isn't the heftiest 15 inch around that would be the 7.8 pound Alienware m15x.

The back of the lid is also black, but has a linen like pattern etched into it. Lenovo calls it a "Light Weave Texture," and while it probably spent more time on the name than the design, it's at least a nice break from the usual flat, glossy laptop shells. Lenovo is known for its excellent keyboards, and the IdeaPad's is very good, with thick, sturdy keys. A row of touch sensitive media control buttons sit above the keyboard, and a volume rocker switch is on the right side of the keyboard tray.

It's worth noting that the traditional Lenovo pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard is missing. The Y510 takes audio seriously, with four front mounted speakers and a subwoofer on the bottom.

The sound is certainly a step above your average laptop, and good for movies and TV, but we have yet to find a laptop that offers acceptable sound for serious music listening. A 1.3 megapixel Webcam sits above the display.

It works with the VeriFace face recognition software, which uses your face to log into Windows. Unlike the Asus U6S, the Lenovo version actually worked well, and we were able to log in almost instantly, after running a quick face enrollment application, without having to play around with positioning and lighting. The 15.4 inch wide screen LCD has a 1,280x800 native resolution, which is standard for a screen this size.

The display looks bigger than it actually is, thanks to a glossy screen overlay that extends right to the edges of the lid. Lenovo calls it a "frameless screen," although we'd probably save that designation for a screen with the smallest possible bezel this one has a fairly standard half inch bezel. The glossy overlay does make for a cleaner look, but it was a bit too glossy for our tastes, and we had a lot of screen glare to contend with.