Lenovo Horizon 27 review

We’ve seen our fair share of novel all-in-one tablet PCs over the last few months, but the Lenovo Horizon 27 trumps them all. Since its size puts it firmly out of tablet territory, Lenovo’s had to dub it a table PC. Its party trick is being able to lie completely flat so you can use it as a tabletop entertainment centre. It even comes with air hockey paddles, an electronic die and small gaming joysticks with sucker pads on the bottom to stick to the screen.

You’ll need two hands to push the PC backwards, but its sturdy hinge simply slides back into a handy recess on the rear panel. You don’t have to lay it flat either, as it will also happily sit at any angle you prefer. Just pull the Horizon 27 from the top and the hinge will do the rest of the work. You’ll need a fair amount of space to do this, but it’s certainly one of the more elegant transitions we’ve seen from an all-in-one PC.

It’s a shame, then, that the PC itself doesn’t look half as stylish. We certainly appreciate the extra grip provided by the rubbery rim that runs all the way round the border of the glass bezel, but we think this cheapens its overall look. We also suspect it’s designed to prevent the Horizon from suffering any knocks or damage while being moved from room to room, as it has an internal battery. However, as it weighs a huge 8.6kg, we’re not sure how many people will be willing to cart it around the house on a regular basis.

You won’t be able to get much use of it away from the mains either, as it lasted just 2h 22m in our light use test and around the same time when we did our continuous video playback test. Admittedly, the Horizon 27 isn’t a laptop or tablet replacement, but even for occasional use battery life is a little weak.

The 27in ten-point touchscreen is lovely to look at, but the display appears considerably brighter when you’re looking at it straight on compared to looking at it from an angle when it’s lying flat. The touchscreen could also be a fraction more responsive. Performing Windows 8 shortcuts and multi-touch gestures was fine, but there was a noticeable amount of lag between touching the screen and it being registered when we tried out some of the pre-installed touch-based apps and games.

Even pinch-zooming on Google Maps was a little slow, but we were prepared to put up with it given its superb image quality. We recorded a huge contrast ratio of 3,938:1, which is nearly eight times higher than most all-in-one PCs, and our high contrast test images looked stunning. Areas of dark shadow had lots of detail and colours looked sharp and vibrant.

Blacks were also very deep, which reflected our outstanding black level reading of just 0.07cd/m² and whites were bright and uniformly lit across the screen. Its colour accuracy was a little less impressive, covering 81.7 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, but this is around average compared to other all-in-one PC’s we’ve tested.

Behind the screen, the Horizon 27 has a 2GHz Intel Core i7-3537U processor and 8GB of RAM. This is the same low-voltage processor that powers most Core i7 Ultrabook laptops, so it’s certainly powerful enough for photo and video editing, but its overall score of 54 in our multimedia benchmarks nevertheless feels a little underwhelming given its price.

The Horizon 27 has the edge when it comes to playing 3D games, thanks to its 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 620M graphics chip. This mid-range chip is still a little underpowered for an all-in-one PC of this price and it failed our Dirt Showdown test on Ultra quality at 1,920x,1080. It managed a respectable 30.2fps in the laptop version of our Dirt Showdown test when we set the quality to High at a 1,280×720 resolution. This is just about playable for fast-paced shooters and action games, but lowering the quality will increase the speed even further. We even managed a decent frame rate of 39.4fps when we increased the resolution to its native 1,920×1,080, but we had to keep the quality set to Low to achieve this.

The only real disappointment we had with the Horizon 27 was its lack of ports. All you get are two USB3 ports, an HDMI input so you can use the PC as a monitor, a multi-format card reader and separate headphone and microphone jacks. It’s a little more versatile than the Dell XPS 18, but we would have liked to have seen a few more connections given its size.

The lack of USB ports is a particular problem if you want to use the bundled wireless mouse and keyboard as the Horizon 27 doesn’t have an integrated wireless receiver. Instead, you’ll have to sacrifice a USB port to use the small USB receiver, which effectively leaves you with just one free USB port, which is worse than your typical laptop.

The keyboard was fine for everyday use and produced a good level of tactile feedback. You’ll have to get used to the switched positions of the Fn and Ctrl keys, but otherwise the keys are well-spaced and there’s enough room for a numeric keypad on the right. The mouse, on the other hand, was far too small for our hands. It was quick and responsive, but we preferred to use the touchscreen when we needed to interact with the desktop.

The integrated speakers were also a little underwhelming. They’re fine for listening to the odd YouTube video, but its tiny amount of bass will make music fans reach for a pair of headphones.

Our main concern, though, is the price. The novelty factor certainly adds a lot to the overall cost, but at £1,600, you could buy two Dell XPS 18s and still have money left over. Otherwise, we’d recommend the Best Buy winning Acer Aspire 7600U.