Lenovo IdeaPad Y480 Review: A Solid Mobile Entertainment PC Discussion

Lenovo's all new IdeaPad Y480 is a 14-inch multimedia notebook designed to give you a perfect balance between serious performance for work and multimedia power for play. Whether you're editing HD video for a school project or playing the latest video games, this laptop has you covered. Keep reading to find out if it's worth the price.

Read the full content of this Article: Lenovo IdeaPad Y480 Review: A Solid Mobile Entertainment PC

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Give me 900P or give me death!!!

 

Considering that an ever-increasing number of tablets are coming to the market with screen resolutions of 1080p or better, it's only a matter of time before notebook manufacturers are essentially forced to use higher-resolution displays even in budget laptops.

We're fast approaching the point where 1366x768 won't even cut it on 12-inch laptops ... not just 14-inch and larger laptops.

 

I'm still hoping that the backlit keyboard is interchangeable with the one on my Y470. If they're not too expensive on eBay in the coming months, I might have to buy one and try it out.

 

I am very much looking forward to this day.

 

This is such a terrible offer for 1500.....

 

It's currently $850 on Lenovo's site.

 

Lenovo tends to be generous with coupons, make sure you do some googling for coupon codes. As AboutThreeFitty said, it's already almost half the "MSRP" listed without any coupons (not that the MSRP means anything ... Lenovo likes to make it look like you are getting a huge discount when you're really not).

 

I don't see what problem people have with a 1366 * 768 resolution on a 14-inch. I have this setup and have to increase the size of on-screen stuff to 125% to make it comfortable to read. At the native resolution and DPI everything is painfully small.

Sure if you're gaming a higher resolution wouldn't go amiss, but why would you game on the laptop screen with terrible colour, contrast and viewing angles? I plug mine into a proper monitor for watching video or playing games.

Anyway I contacted Lenovo UK and apparently only the Y580 is coming out here - maybe on that a 1366 * 768 would be too little. But a 1920 * 1080 would definitely be too much. I don't like holding my head 6 inches from the screen to read.

 

The older I get (and the older my parents get) the more I understand the argument that resolutions higher than 1366x768 make it difficult to read text in a Windows environment at native display settings ... but that's an issue with Windows and one that Microsoft knows it has to work out.

The reality is that we are globally becoming consumers of "greater than HD" content. 4K cameras (between 4096x1714 or 3840x2160 depending on which standard you use) are increasingly becoming available to the makers of movies and TV and 4K displays are just around the corner (LG showed a 84-inch 4K HDTV at CES this year with 3840x2160 resolution).

The newest iPad has a 9.7-inch display with 2048x1536 resolution ... and reading text on that small screen isn't a problem at all because the OS and applications understand what they need to do in order to display text clearly for human eyes.

We're already at the point where most tech enthusiasts don't consider 1366x768 to be acceptable and we're fast approaching at the point where even average consumers are going to expect AT LEAST a 1080p resolution on whatever digital device they buy.

 

Yeah I guess it is something Microsoft has to work on, specifically merging the size-option with ALL applications on a PC, not just windows/Microsoft products. One of the reasons I started using Firefox instead of Chrome was that I couldn't find an add-on for Chrome that would globally zoom all pages to a specific value. There's probably one available now but I CBA changing browsers.

Nobody is pretty enough for 4K resolutions. Watching some regular TV shows filmed in HD makes everyone on screen age about 10 years. Who wants to see that amount of wrinkles and skin flaws? I think the same of most amateur digital photography. People looked nicer in the days of film.

HD makes sense in games, and movies where they have the kind of budgets to use the best make-up (and hire the prettiest actors).

Anyway, I'm getting off topic here.

 

Twenty icons on the desktop? Is that how it came from the factory? Bloatware much?

You don't need an add-on. Click on the wrench, click on "settings," click on "show advanced settings" at the bottom, and default page zoom can be changed under "web content."

 

Well that option wasn't there back when I was choosing browsers. Just page-specific zoom. I'm set in my Firefox ways now.

 

You can always change browsers Over the years, I've at one time or another had the following as my primary browser:

Internet Explorer
Firefox
Chrome
Safari
Camino

Right now, I'm actually kind of pleased with IE9, and I've been using that as a primary with Chrome as a secondary. I used to love Firefox but the love affair has ended.

 

To be fair, about half of the icons in that shot are icons for benchmarking software that we installed for testing. That's not to say the IdeaPad was free from bloatware ... we just don't want you to jump to conclusions based on a photo we took in our studio.

 

Okay, that makes things a lot better. Thanks for the clarification.

 

Any news on release date/uk price for this?

 

Why would people want Full HD on anything less than a GTX or equiv AMD? And on a 14" screen no less. Wouldn't full HD on a 640M LE be a bit like running a 520MX at 1366x768 res? Personally I have 1366x768 on a 15.6" and it's fine for most apps including media, rarely have I felt the need for more res. And in games I haven't been forced to lower resolution (and suffer through a blurry upscaled image). Photo/video editing won't be much benefit because of the mediocre screen. The only advantages I see would be CAD work where the extra real estate would help, but thats questionable as well since everything would be much smaller. And watching video when on the move.

Don't get me wrong, full HD is great on a laptop, but only if the hardware can handle it properly in the first place. Full HD on the mainstream sector is just there for e-peen

 

I find 900p or 1080p nice for word processing. Much sharper text, and Word's ribbon takes up less space.

You're right, for the gaming it's a waste with casual GPUs.

 

Indeed. There isn't a point in trying to play modern games at good settings at 1080p resolution with GT-class GPUs, but keep in mind that Lenovo offers this with a Blu-ray drive for watching 1080p movies.

Yes, you can connect the notebook to a HDTV via an HDMI cable, but it's sort of a let down to watch Blu-ray on a 720p screen.

 

Yeah, having a Blu-Ray player on something with less than a 1080p screen is kind of silly.