Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 15D review

We were big fans of the Flex15D’s keyboard. The keys gave an excellent level of tactile feedback, which made it very pleasant for typing on for long periods of time, and its keys were sensibly laid out to accommodate its numeric keypad.

The large all-in-one touchpad was a joy to use, as its smooth surface was very responsive and its lower half gave a good level of feedback when we used it to click files and icons. This is a big improvement from the original Flex 15, and the touchpad’s overall sensitivity also seems to have been retuned, as multi-touch gestures and Windows 8 gestures all worked fine without a hitch.

The Flex 15D has a good range of ports for such a slim laptop, including three USB ports, one of which is USB3, an HDMI video output for connecting the laptop to an external display, an SD and MMC card reader, a Fast Ethernet port and a combined headphone and microphone jack.

Battery life was also excellent, as the Flex 15D lasted 7h 13m in our light use battery test with the screen set to half brightness. It’s not quite as impressive as the original Flex 15’s ten and a half hours, but it’s still a lot better than other similarly priced laptops.

Sadly, the Flex15D’s main downside is the very thing that makes it stand out from its sibling: its underpowered AMD hardware. Its 2GHz AMD A6-2500 APU and 8GB of RAM scored just 31 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which is a full sixteen points behind the £80 more expensive Core i5 version of the Flex 15. This score is roughly equivalent to a Core i3 laptop, which wouldn’t be so bad if the Core i3 version of the Flex 15 didn’t cost roughly £50 less. It’s still capable of handling everyday office tasks, but it may struggle slightly if you have several applications open at once.

The laptop’s integrated AMD Radeon HD 8400 chip isn’t quite powerful enough to run 3D games either, as it only just passed our Dirt Showdown test with an average frame rate of 17.6fps on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution. We had to set the quality to Low before we saw a playable 32.2fps, so you might be better off sticking with 2D games instead.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 15D is still a fun alternative to the expensive Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, but its sluggish components make the Intel version much better value. If your budget doesn’t stretch that far and you still want a touchscreen, the Acer Aspire V5-572P Touch is a better buy.