Lenovo IdeaPad 120S

Lenovo IdeaPad 120S Notebook

Lenovo IdeaPad 120S is a very pleasant budget solution. This laptop not bad combines surprisingly boring design, decent indicators of autonomy. However, the savings resulted in a low-level display and, of course, the build quality suffered.

Despite the frank cheapness, the laptop looks very decent. Its body is made of plastic and polycarbonate, which are extremely accurate in replicating real aluminum – still, the silver color is able to mask the obvious. The quality of materials leaves much to be desired, since any pressure from outside causes the panels to bend clearly.

On the cover is the logo of the manufacturer, it does not affect the degree of elegance of the case, because it is lost on the silver background of the cover. One continuous loop also does not stand out from the general concept, offering to open the laptop almost 180 degrees. But, the design itself is rather shaky and does not have to intensive use by the user. The dimensions of the Lenovo IdeaPad 120S are 288x200x21 mm, weight 1.27 kg.

Not bad on a light background look darker gray island keyboard and black border of the display. And in general, this laptop can be proud of its external data, since the budget level implies exceptional boredom in design, and here we see the dignity and endurance of “not being everything.”

The 11.6-inch display has a resolution of 1366×768 pixels, which, in principle, is enough for such a compact panel. But, the TN matrix at the core will “delight” with very limited viewing angles, and there are certain issues with brightness / contrast / color reproduction – a dim screen with 50% coverage of sRGB definitely signals that we are dealing with a $ 200 laptop. But Lenovo IdeaPad 120S boasts a matte finish of quite decent quality, so that, gentlemen, it will work here in sunlight, although you will have to adapt.

Two speakers, rated at 1 watt each, are on the bottom of the notebook. It has long been no secret that this is not the best location, because the sound is muffled in the absence of headphones or external speakers. But, for the sake of justice, it is worth noting that the acoustics in the laptop are very good, sometimes even the bass is audible, and when you increase the volume to the maximum, the sound is almost not distorted.

A webcam with a minimum resolution of 0.3 megapixel can be found in the usual place for it – at the top of the display frame. The quality of work corresponds to the minimum figures in the stated characteristics – a grainy dim image suitable for communication in Skype.

Of course, on such a small space of an 11-inch laptop, the pad just did not fit, but otherwise the island keyboard is a very good input device. A rather small stroke of 1.2 mm requires a little getting used to, but the keys are responsive and pressed clearly, they are clearly visible on the silver substrate due to the dark gray color. The latter, by the way, is not very durable – the bends are especially noticeable in the center and on the left side. The standard layout guarantees the usual location of the characters on the buttons, the switch unit is partially reduced – only the up and down arrows.

The touchpad shows a relatively small size – it fits perfectly into the general background with a smooth working surface and small mouse keys. Its sensitivity is good, navigation using the touchpad is accurate and fast, there is support for multi-touch gestures.

Lenovo IdeaPad 120S-11IAP is running the operating system Windows 10 Home. The dual-core Intel Celeron N3350 with a clock frequency of 1.1-2.4 GHz is chosen as the processor here . It is part of the Apollo Lake generation and has a 2 MB second-level cache without supporting hyper-threading technology. In terms of performance, the chip can be assessed as an entry-level solution with good energy efficiency indicators (TDP 6 W), coping well with simple tasks and undemanding multitasking.

Integrated Intel HD Graphics 500(Apollo Lake) supports DirectX 12 and uses 12 execution units at frequencies up to 650 MHz. This is a fairly weak graphics, which is suitable only for old and simple games, H.265 / HEVC video encoding.

The amount of RAM LPDDR4-2133 MHz is 4 GB and, unfortunately, this is the maximum allowable storage capacity. As a drive used eMMC 32 GB.

This laptop is too cheap to offer a lot of connectors. Nevertheless, there is everything you need: on the left are USB 3.0, USB Type-C, HDMI and a proprietary port for the charger. On the right are the microSD card reader, a combined audio and another USB 3.0. For wireless access to the Internet using the module Wi-Fi 802.11ac, also has Bluetooth 4.0.

The laptop is equipped with a 32Wh lithium-ion 2-cell battery and autonomy is quite decent: surfing the web with activated Wi-Fi takes just over seven and a half hours, which is enough for almost full time.

Summary

Despite skeptical opinion about the Lenovo IdeaPad 120S in advance (mainly because of the price), this laptop has a lot to be proud of. And, by the way, it is the minimal cost, against the background of such advantages as a good Celeron N3350 processor, the presence of a modern USB Type-C and decent autonomy, plays a positive role. Of course, I had to sacrifice the build quality and use inexpensive materials, build a cheap display matrix and forget about decent resolution of a webcam, but agree that today’s $ 200 for a laptop, albeit 11-inch, is a ridiculous amount that pays for itself immediately The multiple virtues of the Lenovo IdeaPad 120S.

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