Review: Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch

It's a tall order. Build a capable laptop, thin and light, with a touchscreen, and keep the price at a mainstream-friendly $700 or less. Yes, sacrifices will have to be made to get there, but surely this can be done, right? In the case of the Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch, the answer apparently remains no.

Lenovo has unexpectedly been a leader at producing affordable yet capable notebooks, or at least it's been giving it the old college try. Without any real exceptions, its sub-$1,000 laptops (like the recent IdeaPad Z400 Touch) have been lackluster at best, cutting too many of Lenovo's classically sharp corners in order to reach a mainstream audience.

Lenovo's latest iteration on this theme is the IdeaPad U430 Touch, which is more ultrabook-esque in its approach and design than the chunkier Z400. With its sleek aluminum body, big clickpad, and svelte-looking keyboard you might start patting yourself on the back, thinking you stumbled across a half-price MacBook Air. Well, not exactly. Let's pull back the curtain a bit further.

Specs aren't likely to blow you away: 1.6GHz Core i5, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB standard hard drive with 16GB of solid state storage built in. You also get integrated graphics, no optical drive, and a 14-inch screen with 1600 x 900 pixels of resolution. Ports include three USB connectors (two 2.0, one 3.0), HDMI, a flip-out Ethernet port, and an SD card reader. Overall performance across a range of benchmarks was either about average or somewhat lackluster when compared to other Haswell-class machines. That said, considering the price tag, it's perfectly acceptable for most mainstream uses outside of gaming and multimedia content creation. At 4.1 pounds it's about average for this screen size, and at 24mm thick, just a hair thicker than most 14-inchers currently on the market. Offering about 5 hours of full-screen video playback, battery life is solid.

All that aside, my real complaints have nothing to do with speed or girth. Rather, the biggest issues are that Lenovo has saddled the U430 Touch with an unfortunate keyboard and a barely functional touchpad. The "AccuType" keyboard is anything but. While Lenovo has traditionally and wisely eschewed the popular industry choice of using perfectly flat keys – which are demonstrably more difficult to type on – in favor of slightly convex ones, here it takes two steps back. At best the keys on the U430 are flat, and I swear they actually have a very slight convexity to them, though I'd need to disassemble the laptop to prove it. The touchpad is considerably worse. Much like the clickpad on the Z400, the U430's touch surface feels "loose," moving around noticeably in the chassis when you tap on it. This invariably causes the cursor to jump, making your taps not register or causing you to click on something you didn't want. This is a real and nagging problem with Lenovo machines (and not a one-off defect) which gets miraculously fixed now and then, then returns a few months later to its production laptops, time and time again.

The screen is a disaster on a whole other level. While the resolution is fine, the actual quality of the screen is dismal. Dim, blurry, and difficult to discern unless you're looking at it dead on, it would be wholly dismissable if not for the highly accurate ten-point multitouch feature, which worked flawlessly in my testing. If I could actually see what I was tapping on, well, that would be better.

The U430's in a difficult position: It's technically "worth" its $700 price tag, but if you're willing to accept flaws like this you can get the same quality at an even lower price in a second-tier brand. On the other hand, anyone looking for a true ultrabook experience – power and usability without sacrificing portability – better machines can be had for just a few hundred bucks more. I know which decision I'd make.