Introduction, Design, & Features
Pleased to meet you, Joe Consumer. We see you and your wife, Sunday Circular, have wandered into Best Buy in search of a laptop under $500. You'll find many such machines here. There are notebooks with 4GB of RAM. These over here have 500GB hard drives. And of course there's a whole shelf of Chromebooks.
But before you decide, may we suggest you check out this model, the 15.6-inch Lenovo Ideapad 320 (sometimes abbreviated to 320-15IKB Touch; the letters are a reference to Intel "Kaby Lake," but you can safely ignore that). It's not quite a bare-minimum system: Instead of a Pentium or Celeron processor, there's a Core i3. Instead of 4GB of memory, the Lenovo has 6GB. Instead of a 500GB hard drive, you'll find a 1TB drive. It even has a touch screen, which is fun and unexpected in this price range. And at $479, it fits your budget.
Design
Lenovo says the 320 is dressed in "uniquely playful tone-on-tone Platinum Gray," which is the first time we've heard gray described as playful. But the plastic lid contrasts nicely with the somewhat darker plastic chassis below, and the front edge comes together in a curved wedge that faintly reminded us of an oversized MacBook Air. There's a Lenovo logo etched into the lid and another below the screen.
Like other 15.6-inch notebooks, the Ideapad is relatively big and heavy, measuring 0.9 by 14.9 by 10.2 inches and tipping the scale at 4.85 pounds. Don't look for the space-saving design of a Dell XPS 15 (0.66 by 14.1 by 9.3 inches) or other thin-bezeled systems; there's a vast expanse of palm rest, and unused room on either side of the keyboard despite the latter's containing a numeric keypad.
You can, however, look for a feature that machines like the XPS 15 lack—an optical drive, located on the Lenovo's right side. The DVD burner will let you enjoy CDs and DVDs (not Blu-ray discs) and archive files to 4.7GB media. Except for a cable lock slot, it's the only feature on the 320's right edge.
The ports are all on the left edge: a proprietary one for the compact power adapter plug, Ethernet and HDMI ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port, an audio jack, an SD card slot, and a system reset pinhole for use in emergencies. The USB-C port is a USB 3.1 Gen 1 (in other words, USB 3.0 with the newer connector) data port; you shouldn't expect a Thunderbolt 3 port at this price.
The only thing lower-res than the Ideapad's screen is the Webcam above it, which captures fuzzy 1,280x720 images. Considering its poor results, we were pleasantly surprised that the 320's sound wasn't too bad—a little flat and lacking in bass, but loud enough to fill a small room without being distorted or tinny. Your MP3's will be recognizable.
![lenovo-ideapad-320-15-inch-right-side.jpg]
(
Features
The keyboard features something that never fails to drive us crazy—half-sized up and down arrow keys sandwiched between full-sized left and right arrows, in a row instead of an inverted T. We don't like it from HP or Apple, and we certainly don't like it from keyboard specialist Lenovo. The arrow keys double up with the Fn key in lieu of dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys, too.
Otherwise, the non-backlit keyboard is satisfactory, except possibly for the tiny Delete key, with adequate travel and a crisp typing feel. The top-row keys conveniently default to system functions such as adjusting volume and brightness, teaming with the Fn key if you want F11 or whatever. There's a square, Windows Hello-compatible fingerprint reader below the keypad. The buttonless touch pad performs smoothly if a little stiffly for lower-corner clicks.
Our only real complaint about the 320's screen is its low resolution—1,366x768 pixels are something you can expect to find in a 10- or at most 11.6-inch laptop or convertible, not a 15.6-inch desktop replacement. Our sister site PC Mag's favorite full-sized budget notebook, the Acer Aspire E 15,$349.99 at Amazon offers a full HD display for $349. Mere HD resolution limits you to 720p instead of 1080p video viewing; it cramps your style when editing images or even when trying to see a range of spreadsheet cells or calendar dates.
