Lenovo Ideapad Z580 — A Keyboard And Trackpad Away From Greatness

Performance

Let’s get this out of the way: the Lenovo Z580 is fast. Even with an i5 processor, which is certainly no slouch but several rungs below top of the line, this machine feels more than capable of handling day-to-day business and multimedia tasks. In fact, if runs almost as quickly as if it had a solid state hard drive, which is impressive. Multitasking is also respectable, and the laptop has a quality screen, with good side angle viewing and nice contrast and brightness. All in all, a competent effort on the part of Lenovo. Multimedia is great, with louder than average volume with no distortion and smooth playback of video content locally stored and over the network from YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu. Networking is also positive, with near-instantaneous wireless connections to my WPA2 secured home network and performance consistent with 208.11n networking, which is to say, more than adequate for normal home and business use (if you’re transferring hundreds of gigabytes of data I’d go looking for a network cable, but that’s true of most wireless connections). Battery performance is also good, clocking in at a little less than five hours of a mix of business use and playing network videos. The system as provided with the six cell battery weighs a bit less than 6 pounds. The base warranty in the U.S. is one year parts and labor, but you have to mail in the unit. Warranty upgrades are available.

Strengths & Weaknesses

There are, in general, three primary interfaces to any computer: keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Audio, camera, printing and scanning, these are all important, but the vast majority of interactions are through the hands and eyes. And that is where I ran into trouble with the Z580.

Z580’s keyboard is impressive. The keys are each distinct, with no lip or sloped portion between them like on most other laptop keyboards. Although the keyboard looks different, it doesn’t seem to affect my typing at all, but I can feel the difference. What does affect my typing, however, is the mass of number pad keys inhabiting the entire right side of the keyboard. While it’s an impressive feat of engineering to cram so many keys into such a small space and still have them be functional, I do have a few issues with this layout, such as:

• If this is marketed to more media-centric users, why would they need a number pad?
• The right shift and backslash keys had to be reduced in size to accommodate the number pad.
• It’s difficult for me to find the arrow keys without looking.
• The trackpad is over to the left of the laptop. While I have seen this before, with or without a number pad, I never consider this a good design decision.

I can get used to the keyboard, but I don’t really understand why I should have to on a machine marketed for home/personal use.

The backslash and shift buttons are smaller, and ctrl is moved, which results in a lot of typing errors.

The trackpad is a different matter. I not only find the lack of buttons unintuitive, but see it as a regression from more conventional, and functional, two-button designs. The Mac used to have a single button mouse but diehard Mac users are increasingly adopting the PC’s two mouse standard for the flexibility it affords. With previous laptops, I would hold my thumb on the left button and navigate with my index fingers. Doing that here, I instantly zoomed in my active window to 400 percent without knowing quite why. It took me a minute to understand that the trackpad interprets my stationary thumb and moving finger as performing an expand gesture via multi-touch, much like Apple’s iOS. Getting it to left click instead of right click is nearly-draconian as I have to be all the way in the corner to make it work. The experience is so frustrating that had I continued I would have resorted to a mouse. This is disappointing as it takes away from an otherwise excellent device.

The trackpad with no buttons was frustrating and resulted in constant accidental zooming in.

The Z580’s multimedia buttons are interesting in that they look like any other illuminated indicators above the keyboard, but are touch-sensitive. This is something you would need to know as it’s not obvious. The buttons are cute and cool, but the technology doesn’t seem particularly necessary. In my experience, the same goes for the OneKey Theatre II, which only serves to change the brightness and maybe color temperature. To be honest, I didn’t use the OneKey past the initial testing of it and had no trouble seeing videos or the desktop regardless of the setting.

The touch-sensitive buttons above control the volume and brightness.

There is a small button just to the right of the power button that acts as the OneKey Rescue System. Apparently, if you turn the system off and press it, the machine boots into a special recovery mode. I didn’t test this feature because I prefer complete backups and strongly recommend everyone perform them regularly.

The thermal management “dedusting mode” is a feature far more useful than you might think. Computers, and especially laptops, use airflow through their case to manage the heat generated by internal components. Heatsinks (think radiators for computer components) sit on the most critical heat generating components including the CPU, GPU, and chipsets. These heatsinks transfer the heat from those components to the air that’s pushed through the machine via internal fans. Over time, dust and gunk accumulate on those components, restricting airflow and causing overheating. I’ve seen many older laptops crash due to heating problems from dust. Dedusting mode is a maintenance cycle that alternates the fan running high in both directions for a period of time, hopefully clearing any dust. Running this periodically will hopefully ensure years of avoiding heat-related issues.

This brings me to the final utility provided by Lenovo: Verface, the company’s facial recognition software. Make no mistake, it’s cool technology. The problem is that it’s not quite ready for prime time. Some examples as to why Verface needs more tweaking: there’s no clear guide from step to step in how to use the software; there are several options and settings that are, at best, confusing, and at worst, completely meaningless to the average user (and reviewer) and potentially incapacitating as you could lock yourself out of the system. In my experience with the system, it’s almost always easier to type in a password than wait for the nifty looking face analysis to complete. I also have no idea what the false positive (mistaking someone else’s face as mine) or false negative (when it misdetects a valid face as incorrect) rates are, but those are always concerns with biometric technologies. So, you can feel more comfortable with a password, even though the more adventurous or curious reader is encouraged to try it out.  As I said, it’s geek-cool.

Wrap Up

The Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 is an interesting mix of highs and lows. It has good performance out of the box and special software optimizations designed to ensure Windows continues to perform as well as when you first buy the system. The screen, network, and other features all seem to work exceedingly well. For me, the challenges are the keyboard and trackpad. If you’re an accountant or are used to a number pad, this notebook may be the bees knees. But if you are, like me, used to a more traditional keyboard layout with large shift and backspace keys, along with a trackpad that has buttons, this particular model may take some getting used to.

I should note that, based on the marketing materials, it appears that the smaller models don’t have the number pad keys.

Overall, I recommend the Z580, but feel it’s not quite what the intended market is looking for, and, like it’s marketing materials, could use a bit more refinement. If Lenovo can smooth out the kinks just a bit, I think they have a real winner in the IdeaPad Z580.