Lenovo Horizon 27 review

We’ve seen our fair share of novel all-in-one tablet PCs over the last few months, but the Lenovo Horizon 27 trumps them all. Since its size puts it firmly out of tablet territory, Lenovo’s had to dub it a table PC. Its party trick is being able to lie completely flat so you can use it as a tabletop entertainment centre. It even comes with air hockey paddles, an electronic die and small gaming joysticks with sucker pads on the bottom to stick to the screen.

You’ll need two hands to push the PC backwards, but its sturdy hinge simply slides back into a handy recess on the rear panel. You don’t have to lay it flat either, as it will also happily sit at any angle you prefer. Just pull the Horizon 27 from the top and the hinge will do the rest of the work. You’ll need a fair amount of space to do this, but it’s certainly one of the more elegant transitions we’ve seen from an all-in-one PC.

It’s a shame, then, that the PC itself doesn’t look half as stylish. We certainly appreciate the extra grip provided by the rubbery rim that runs all the way round the border of the glass bezel, but we think this cheapens its overall look. We also suspect it’s designed to prevent the Horizon from suffering any knocks or damage while being moved from room to room, as it has an internal battery. However, as it weighs a huge 8.6kg, we’re not sure how many people will be willing to cart it around the house on a regular basis.

You won’t be able to get much use of it away from the mains either, as it lasted just 2h 22m in our light use test and around the same time when we did our continuous video playback test. Admittedly, the Horizon 27 isn’t a laptop or tablet replacement, but even for occasional use battery life is a little weak.

The 27in ten-point touchscreen is lovely to look at, but the display appears considerably brighter when you’re looking at it straight on compared to looking at it from an angle when it’s lying flat. The touchscreen could also be a fraction more responsive. Performing Windows 8 shortcuts and multi-touch gestures was fine, but there was a noticeable amount of lag between touching the screen and it being registered when we tried out some of the pre-installed touch-based apps and games.

Even pinch-zooming on Google Maps was a little slow, but we were prepared to put up with it given its superb image quality. We recorded a huge contrast ratio of 3,938:1, which is nearly eight times higher than most all-in-one PCs, and our high contrast test images looked stunning. Areas of dark shadow had lots of detail and colours looked sharp and vibrant.

Blacks were also very deep, which reflected our outstanding black level reading of just 0.07cd/m² and whites were bright and uniformly lit across the screen. Its colour accuracy was a little less impressive, covering 81.7 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, but this is around average compared to other all-in-one PC’s we’ve tested.