Quick look at Lenovo Ideapad 110 – a successor to the most affordable Lenovo notebook right now

Starting at just $279, the refreshed Ideapad 110 series offer the bare minimum of what a user might need from a daily driver but you are in for a surprise to find out how useful it is despite the price. Most importantly, the laptop uses a fan-less cooling system if you chose the Pentium and Celeron options so that’s a big plus to a notebook costing less than $300. Here’s our first impression of the laptop.

You can find the notebook’s price and configurations here: http://amzn.to/2cpqgBG

Design

Of course, keeping in mind the price point of the product, we can’t expect any flashy design or premium materials but we would really like if the chassis doesn’t have build inconsistencies, holes, gaps and sturdy enough not to break in first few months. Luckily, the Ideapad 110 delivers for the most part but adopts a slightly spongy keyboard and lid, although the last one is fairly common in low-end devices.


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The chassis uses hard black plastic with interesting pattern making smooth to touch but also attracts a ton of fingerprints. Interestingly enough, though, they can be cleaned fairly easy. The surface around the keyboard, however, is made of a different finish but still attracts fingerprints and smudges yet feels like faux leather at first. And while the wrist rest area is perfectly stable and rigid, the keyboard tray sinks in even when typing. Probably most users won’t notice this, though.


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Speaking of the keyboard, it’s fairly well-made but has slightly shorter key travel to our taste. And as for the touchpad, it consists of a small trackpad area accompanied by two dedicated mouse buttons. This design is definitely preferable in the low-end segment than the usual trackpad design. The latter tends to wobble or be way too stiff on budget devices so kudos for the design.

Hardware

The hardware options aren’t many – only two CPU configurations – Intel Celeron N3060 and Intel Pentium N3710. Both processors are part of the current Braswell budget generation processors based on the Broadwell architecture. If you choose the more powerful Pentium variant, you will get the Intel HD Graphics 405 iGPU while the Celeron N3060 holds the HD Graphics 400 chip. Configurations include only 4GB of DDR3 memory and up to 1TB of HDD for storage.

And as for the display options, there’s only HD (1366×768) TN panel with glossy finish. We hope the maximum brightness will be slightly higher than average in order to compensate for the glossy finish, which reduces the visibility in well-lit environments. To power all of this, Lenovo has kept the old 24Wh battery from the Ideapad 100 so we don’t expect any better battery life, unfortunately. That was the main drawback of the device. We hope we will see some improvements in the display and performance, though, but we will find out in the upcoming full review.

Specs sheet

Tech specs may differ depending on your region.

CPUIntel Celeron N3060 processor (2-core 1.60-2.48 GHz, 2MB cache) / Intel Pentium N3710 (4-core, 1.60 – 2.56 GHz, 2MB cache)
RAM4GB (1x 4096MB) – DDR3, 1600MHz
GPUIntel HD Graphics 400/405 (Braswell)
HDD/SSDup to 1TB HDD (5400 rpm)
Display15.6-inch HD (1366×768) TN panel, glossy
Optical DriveDVD burner
ConnectivityLAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Other features
  • 1x USB 3.0
  • 1x USB 2.0
  • built-in webcam
  • built-in microphone
  • 3.5 mm audio jack
  • HDMI
  • 4-in-1 SD card reader (MMC, SD, SDHC, SDXC)
  • RJ-45
  • built-in loudspeakers
Battery3-cell, 24Wh
Thickness22.9 mm (0.90″)
Weight2.2 kg (4.85 lbs)

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