Lenovo IdeaPad S405 review

The Lenovo IdeaPad S405 is the newest model in the company’s ultra-portable range of laptops. Just 22mm thick and weighing 1.8kg, it’s just as portable as its predecessors, showing that thin and stylish laptops aren’t limited to the realm of the high-end Ultrabooks.

The real difference comes from the hardware inside. Where the previous Ultrabooks were Intel-based, the S405 is powered by AMD components and we were eager to see how its 2.1GHz AMD A6-4455M processor and 4GB of RAM compared. Sadly, its high clock speed made very little difference when we ran our multimedia benchmarks, as it scored just 16 overall. It was fine for web browsing and composing word documents, but it really started to chug when it tried multi-tasking different programs.

Unsurprisingly, its AMD Radeon HD 7400G graphics chipset was equally poor when it came to playing games and it failed our Dirt Showdown test at High Quality settings and a 720p resolution. By knocking the settings down to Low and disabling the anti-aliasing at the same resolution, we only managed 20fps, which is still too jerky to play. You’ll be much better off sticking to 2D Flash games you can download from the Windows 8 Store to satisfy your gaming fix with this laptop.

This is unfortunate, as we really liked the S405’s keyboard. Its bouncy Chiclet-style keys were well spaced and gave plenty of feedback and we’d happily type on it all day. A good keyboard can only carry a laptop so far, and its all-in-one touchpad was a complete nightmare. We found it was very temperamental.

Multi-touch gestures, such as two-finger scrolling, rarely worked and we had little success with Windows 8 shortcuts as well. We were able to bring up the Charms bar occasionally, but it often simply refused to switch between windows when we swiped from left to right. We suspect this is partly due to the touchpad’s slightly recessed surface area, which makes it difficult to swipe right along the sides, but there were certainly some sensitivity issues as well. Even normal tasks like opening and selecting files quickly became frustrating as it constantly sent our cursor shooting all over the screen when we clicked the lower part of the touchpad. We recommend using a mouse so it doesn’t end up driving you mad.

The S405’s 1,366×768 14in screen wasn’t particularly impressive, either. Its horizontal and vertical viewing angles were good, but colours looked far too cool. This made our high contrast images look quite washed out and the detail in each photo simply appeared as large patches of greyish black. Whites were similarly grey in our solid colour image tests and reds, greens and blues weren’t evenly lit across the screen either, with the lower half of the screen appearing lighter than the top half.

One of the S405’s redeeming features is its range of I/O ports. Most ultra-portables sacrifice a number of connections for the sake of staying slim, but the S405 has three USB ports, one of which is the faster USB3 type, an HDMI port for connecting it up to an external monitor, an SD card reader, a combined headphone and microphone jack and an Ethernet port. Be aware that it only has a fast Ethernet port instead of the more common Gigabit Ethernet port.

You won’t be able to take it on the move for very long, as we only managed 4h 1m in our light use battery life test with the screen set to half brightness. This is very poor, even for a budget laptop, as we’d normally expect to be able to stay away from the mains for at least five hours, if not more. It’s certainly a long way off the nearly-nine hour battery life of the similarly priced Dell Inspiron 15, so this was very disappointing.

Ultimately, the Lenovo IdeaPad S405 has very little to recommend it apart from a decent keyboard. It’s really only suited to the most basic of daily computing tasks, and the Best Buy-winning and infinitely superior Dell Inspiron 15 is only £50 more.