New Laptop Review for Lenovo Y650

Size and Weight
The IdeaPad Y650 does an excellent job of being large without being either bulky or heavy, and for that it should be commended. With dimensions of 15.4” x 10.2” x 1.0” it almost, but not quite, achieves MacBook-like slimness. It does this despite having a 16-inch screen compared to the MacBook’s 15-incher and only weighing a tenth of a pound more at 5.6 lb. It’s obviously pretty wide compared to standard aspect ratio 14-15 inch laptops, but as long as you know what size laptop you’re getting you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the weight and thickness of this laptop. Considering its size, we were very impressed with the portability.
Keyboard and Touchpad
With a laptop this large you can generally expect a large keyboard. Personally, I’m a fan of dedicated numberpads if they can fit comfortably, and the 16-inch form factor is about where you start to see them appear. However, Lenovo has decided to play tricks with our mind here, taking a keyboard you might see in a 14” laptop and literally shoving it towards the very top of the available keyboard space, giving the whole thing a fairly scrunched look. We can understand the lack of a numberpad, as they aren’t terribly common, but were disappointed to see shrunken keys (like right shift and tab) with so much available space.
The shrunken backspace even went so far as to make an annoying springing noise every time we touched it, as if it weren’t quite settled into its slot. On the flipside, the touchpad is wonderfully large, and even boasts some basic pinch-me multitouch functionality. The keyboard and touchpad are both comfortable to use, with just a little flex in the center and a comfortable gridded feeling respectively. Finally, a few push and touch-sensitive buttons casually surround the keyboard on three sides. The features are nice, but we’re not sure why Lenovo included two different and redundant ways to adjust volume or call up OneKey. We’ll explain more below.
Upgrading
The Y650 has an all-in-one bottom plate that you have to remove to access any of the internals, which makes it easy to do big upgrades, but kind of a pain to do small ones. Our laptop was more or less the high end of the Y650s on Lenovo’s site, but it’s possible to tick down the processor to a P8600 and get 3GB RAM on 32bit Vista if you want to save $100. You could also opt for integrated graphics, but currently it won’t save you a dollar (thanks to a Lenovo sale), so we don’t recommend this unless you’re insanely concerned about battery life. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get a higher resolution screen or bigger battery, both of which would be nice additions.
Features
The IdeaPad Y650 comes loaded with Veriface facial recognition technology, which essentially lets you capture an image of your face with the integrated webcam and use it instead of a password to login. The feature is cool and extremely quick and easy to use, but in extreme cases it can still be hacked just like a password, so it’s no reason to be careless if you store sensitive material on your laptop. The Y650 also comes with the front loading DVD drive, which we’re counting as a feature just for its uniqueness.
Other nice features include the enormous touchpad, measuring 4.4 x 2.5-inches, which Lenovo boasts is the largest on any laptop. There is a touch slider at the top which brings up a menu composed of Easy Capture, Ready Connect, Veriface and OneKey. There is also a touch button to switch between “movie mode” and “regular” and next to that, a touch button to call up Dolby sound software. There are physical buttons on either side of the keyboard, but aside from the power button they only let you adjust volume and call up OneKey. OneKey can be run from the slider and the volume is also a function feature on the regular keyboard, so we suspect these buttons were only put in place to take your mind off the fact that the keyboard is so scrunched.