Lenovo Ideapad Y550

Full Review

The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 is a 15-inch mainstream, all purpose laptop from Lenovo that delivers very good all around performance at a very attractive price tag. It comes with the promising Nvidia GeForce GT 240M dedicated graphics card, an onboard subwoofer, and multigesture touchpad, among other interesting multimedia and usability features.

Build and Design
Roughly, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 is a larger version of the Lenovo Ideapad Y450 laptop, but smaller than the 16-inch Lenovo Ideapad Y650 laptop, we reviewed earlier. Unlike the Dell Studio 15 Artist Edition laptop and Acer Aspire 5740 laptop (and many more laptops) with glossy screen lids, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 has a subtly embossed screen lid surface with a nice textured feel that doesn't attract fingerprints. The Ideapad Y550 also has a metallic orange strip running all along its screen edge which accentuates the Lenovo Y550's overall looks with the screen closed down. On the inside, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 offers an elegant metallic coating around the keyboard that spills over to the palmrest.

The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 comes with the best feature set we have seen in a mainstream laptop under Rs. 50,000.

The Ideapad Y550's build quality is very good with the dual-hinged screen nicely supported by the laptop's solid chassis. The onboard speakers are placed between the Ideapad Y550 laptop's spine and keyboard, and there's a subwoofer tucked away on its back side. With its six-cell battery pack, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 weighs 2.7-kg--acceptable for a 15-inch all-purpose home entertainment laptop.

Usability
The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 laptop comes with a glossy 15.6-inch LED backlit screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio, supporting a maximum screen resolution of 1366x768 pixels. The Lenovo Ideapad Y550's screen is great for reading text and watching HD content, and it has good horizontal viewing angles with no notable color shift. Lenovo always equips its laptops with better-than-average keyboard and touchpad (just look at our review of the Lenovo Thinkpad X100e laptop and Lenovo Thinkpad X301 laptop), and that tradition continues with the Ideapad Y550. The Lenovo Y550 comes with a well laid out keyboard with nice, large and springy keys which don't flex and provide optimum feedback. Its touchpad is finely textured, breaks the glossiness of the palmrest, and it is very sensitive right out of the box. The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 laptop's touchpad also supports multi-gesture input to zoom into images and scroll through long documents, and the feature works perfectly well. Amongst our Top 5 Mainstream Laptop recommendations, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 clearly has the best keyboard and touchpad combo.

Hardware Specs and Features
The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 laptop comes equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2-GHz processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 320GB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GT 240M graphics card with 1GB dedicated memory -- great set of basic building blocks. Additionally, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 also has Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity. Apart from the standard set of input-output ports around its chassis (USB, headphone, mic, VGA, DVD writer, multicard reader), the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 also includes an ExpressCard slot, an HDMI and eSATA port. There's a 1.3MP webcam recessed on the Lenovo Ideapad Y550's top screen bezel. Ports placement is well thought out on the Ideapad Y550; Lenovo has made intelligent use of the Ideapad Y550 laptop's front edge to include a headphone, mic, card reader slot, and a Wi-Fi toggle button.

In sync with the Ideapad Y550 laptop's billing as an all purpose home laptop, Lenovo takes care of the entertainment tuned users by providing a handy remote controller. The Ideapad Y550's remote controller has an adequate bunch of multimedia keys and is very convenient while watching movies at a distance. Lenovo also bundles in its proprietary OneKey backup and restore utility on the Ideapad Y550 laptop, with a dedicated button to the left of the keyboard. The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 also includes a face-recognition software (VeriFace) that works flawlessly, and has a touch-sensitive strip (Lenovo Desktop Navigator - SlideNav) between the keyboard and the screen hinge for instantly launching various frequently used programs. The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 comes with 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, and quite frankly the best feature set we have seen in a mainstream laptop.

Performance
The Lenovo Ideapad Y550 laptop's WorldBench 6 score of 88 is right up there with the best mainstream laptops, and it remains unscaled in its PC Mark 05, PC Mark Vantage, 3D Mark 06, and Cinebench scores. Overall, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 had the best synthetic benchmark figures amongst its category of laptops. Its 3D Mark 06 score of 6650 is the best we've seen on a mainstream laptop, courtesy the Ideapad Y550's Nvidia GeForce GT240M dedicated graphics card. Like the Sony VAIO CW laptop, rest assued the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 is more than just a casual gaming machine -- Far Cry 2 was playable at High Settings. We had absolutely no trouble watching movies on the Lenovo Ideapad Y550's 15-inch widescreen display, and the laptop handled both 720p and 1080p HD videos without any hiccups. The accompanying subwoofer on the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 helps it deliver a very good audio experience--and this can't be said of every mainstream laptop. In short, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 is a very good multimedia and gaming machine.

With so much high-end performance, there's little surprise the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 doesn't have great battery life -- less than 90 minutes in our benchmark at high performance preset and full screen brightness. But high battery life isn't what the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 promises, anyway--and it shouldn't matter if you are looking at it as an all purpose home laptop.

Bottom Line

Simply put, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 is the best mainstream laptop under Rs. 50,000 available in the market right now. For Rs. 44,990, the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 offers excellent value for money. It also gives you unmatched performance, a host of useful and unique features, and combines multimedia entertainment and gaming very well.