Lenovo Ideapad 110 review: Nice as your first laptop

The days when laptop computers used to be super expensive are long gone. Thanks to the advances in technology and dropping manufacturing costs, there are numerous laptops (from manufacturers both big and small) available across all price segments today. So even for those who just want a notebook PC that handles the basics right, there's no dearth of choice in the market And that's precisely the audience Lenovo is targeting with its Ideapad 110 laptop . Glancing at the raw specifications, the Lenovo Ideapad 110 appears to be a fairly decent option for those who are in the market to get their first notebook PC. But a capable spec sheet doesn't automatically equate to good real-world performance. So, is the Lenovo Ideapad 110 a laptop you should spend Rs 24,790 on? Read our in-depth review, and decide yourself. Design and build quality With a 15.6-inch display, the Lenovo Ideapad 110 is definitely a sizeable machine. Although the laptop is entirely made of plastic, the all around textured finish makes it appear more premium than it actually is. The back of the screen-housing module is largely bare, save for a shiny Lenovo logo at the top right corner. The top edge of the display has a VGA resolution webcam and an array microphone.

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As for the bottom-module, its centre is where the full-size chiclet keyboard. Thanks to the display size, the keyboard also has the number pad to its right. During our testing, we found the keyboard quality to be pretty good, especially given the laptop's price. The keys have decent travel distance and provide good feedback. A horizontal speaker grille (of which only the centre one-third is the actual speaker) sits above the keyboard, whereas the trackpad (along with left and right click buttons) is below it. Coming to the sides of the Ideapad 110, the left has the power jack, Ethernetport, USB 2.0 (1), USB 3.0 (1) and 3.5mm audio jack (1). On the right, there's nothing other than a tray-loading optical disc drive and a Kensington lock. There's also a card reader slot placed at the front edge of the bottom port. Overall, we found the design and build quality of the Lenovo Ideapad 110 to be appreciably good. However, the display-housing module wobbles a bit while working on the laptop. Display Lenovo Ideapad 110 has a 15.6-inch display of 1366x768 resolution. Due to the low resolution stretching over a comparatively large panel, pixelation is visible in everything from text to images. Granted, it's unrealistic to expect a Full HD panel at this price, but we feel that Lenovo could've upped the resolution at least a little bit. That said, the display has reasonably accurate colour reproduction and viewing angles are good as well. It's also quite usable under direct sunlight, provided you max out the brightness level. In a nutshell, the display quality of the Lenovo Ideapad 110, while not the greatest, is pretty good for the price. Performance The Lenovo Ideapad 110 is powered by a quad-core Intel Pentium N3710 processor clocked at 1.60GHz. Sporting on-board Intel HD graphics, the notebook PC comes with 4GB of RAM and 500GB of HDD-based storage. While this does appear to be hardware competent enough for delivering good day-to-day performance, it still makes the laptop struggle at basic tasks quite often. During our testing, we found the Lenovo Ideapad 110 to be a bit slow at times. Opening up multiple tabs in Google Chrome caused the computer to slow down to a crawl, and the browser crashed on numerous occasions. It's good that the Ideapad 110 ships with Windows 10 (Single Language) pre-installed, but its hardware isn't adequate enough to run Windows 10 without issues. However, the Ideapad 110 handles other basic tasks like document editing just fine. Talking about multimedia playback, the Ideapad 110 delivered well. The audio output from the built-in speakers is clean, even if a bit on the quieter side. Full HD videos (both streaming and local) play as they should. Unsurprisingly though, the Ideapad 110 falters with 4K playback. To quantify the performance, the laptop scored 1835 in PCMark's benchmarking test, which is just about average. Lastly, let's talk about battery backup. In the course of our testing, Lenovo Ideapad 110 lasted around 3-4 hours with a fully charged battery. This is not exactly the best battery backup, but still decent enough for the price.