Tuesday 6 September 2011

Lenovo Thinkpad E520: First Impressions

The first thing I noticed obviously was the box. It's simple, it's mostly uncoloured and it was just a box. The packaging stresses how it is made out of  recycled materials. I have no idea of what percentage of the material is recycled, however.


The keyboard feels very, very comfortable to type on. The keys didn't give much resistance and they're indented slightly so that my fingers almost feel like they're melting into them while I'm typing this.


The finish isn't glossy anywhere except for the spaces between the keys, which is a bit odd. I am glad that the screen is anti-glare because I hate glare. How the hell shiny screens became popular I'll never know. The back of the screen has a bit of a rubbery feel to it, perhaps to minimise fingerprints.

One thing that concerns me at the moment is the real lack of indicators on the laptop. There is a little light to dot the 'i' on the Thinkpad logo that turns on whenever the laptop is turned on, and a charging light on the side, but aside from that there really isn't anything to tell you of the hard drive activity or whether caps/numlock is on.

I bought the version that normally costs $649.00, with a little discount. It has an Intel Core i5-2410m CPU with 4GB of ram and a AMD Radeon HD 6630m discrete graphics card, so it is possible to do some decent gaming on this thing.

I may do a fuller review later, because when I was looking for reviews of this thing after I bought it (stupid I know) I couldn't really find any that were in English.