Lenovo IdeaPad S405 review

The S405’s 1,366×768 14in screen wasn’t particularly impressive, either. Its horizontal and vertical viewing angles were good, but colours looked far too cool. This made our high contrast images look quite washed out and the detail in each photo simply appeared as large patches of greyish black. Whites were similarly grey in our solid colour image tests and reds, greens and blues weren’t evenly lit across the screen either, with the lower half of the screen appearing lighter than the top half.

One of the S405’s redeeming features is its range of I/O ports. Most ultra-portables sacrifice a number of connections for the sake of staying slim, but the S405 has three USB ports, one of which is the faster USB3 type, an HDMI port for connecting it up to an external monitor, an SD card reader, a combined headphone and microphone jack and an Ethernet port. Be aware that it only has a fast Ethernet port instead of the more common Gigabit Ethernet port.

You won’t be able to take it on the move for very long, as we only managed 4h 1m in our light use battery life test with the screen set to half brightness. This is very poor, even for a budget laptop, as we’d normally expect to be able to stay away from the mains for at least five hours, if not more. It’s certainly a long way off the nearly-nine hour battery life of the similarly priced Dell Inspiron 15, so this was very disappointing.

Ultimately, the Lenovo IdeaPad S405 has very little to recommend it apart from a decent keyboard. It’s really only suited to the most basic of daily computing tasks, and the Best Buy-winning and infinitely superior Dell Inspiron 15 is only £50 more.