Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 Pro Reviews

An attractive exterior, solid ergonomics and spritely performance combine to create a cracking budget laptop

Perfect if you like to watch films or play games on the go, but its poor battery life touchpad prevent the Z580 from achieving true greatness

The Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 represents a great value thanks to its combination of good build quality, a solid keyboard and touchpad, good performance, and six hour battery life. The only areas that need improvement are the screen -- 1366x768 is low and hard to be productive with -- and speakers, which sound tinnier than expected. The fan also has a slight whine but isn't loud enough to be annoying. I'm willing to forgive all of these items as none of other notebooks in this price range offer anything better and struggle to match the Z580 in its other qualities.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad Z580, as we received it, will set you back about $599. That’s a good price for a new laptop with a Core i5-3210M processor. I was not able to find a similar deal on competitor websites at the time of this writing. That can easily change, but at this time the Z580 seems a bargain. I also like the traits that turn me on to all IdeaPads. The keyboard is good, the touchpad is large and the design is attractive but also business-casual. The fan can be annoying, but operating temperatures are exceedingly low. This is a good laptop for anyone who just wants a general, all-purpose computer that can also called upon for serious productivity. Students who don’t care about gaming and self-employed folks on a budget will find this laptop ideal. My main beef is Intel HD 4000. As mentioned, I saw a blurb about the GT 630M in the pamphlet, but this does not appear to be available in production models right now. Adding this would broaden the appeal of the laptop significantly. HP already taps in to this market and offers some surprisingly good optional GPUs on many inexpensive models.

The Lenovo Z580 is a stylish and reasonably well-built laptop. If you don’t want to play games or other graphically demanding duties there's less reason to spend £200 over the comparable Dell Inspiron 15R, although you do get stronger construction and Blu-ray playback.