Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i Review: A Strong Workforce

It’s been quite some time since Intel announced its 11th generation laptop processors, complete with a new logo design and Intel Iris Xe graphics. However, I haven’t received a laptop with a new processor and iGPU so far. All that changed when Lenovo shipped the IdeaPad Slim 5i (Rs. 61.990) All the new products Intel has made and a bunch of typical Lenovo products. So, if you’re in the market for a new business laptop that doesn’t break the bank or your back, and you’re considering the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i, here’s our laptop review.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i Review

Features

As always with our reviews, let’s take a quick look at the specs of this laptop before we dive into the review.

Design and Build

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i doesn’t seem to cut any corners in terms of design and build. The laptop comes with a typical Lenovo design language, which I love. This means it has a cover with no annoyingly large branding, only a small Lenovo sticker on the left edge. The laptop itself is thin and adapts well to the touch.

The delicacy is no surprise, though. After all, the name is there. However, I appreciate laptops that aren’t too bulky for no reason, and it’s nice to see most business laptops these days have a slimmer profile.

Once you open the cover, the IdeaPad Slim 5 continues to impress. Here’s a large 15.6-inch screen surrounded by thin bezels that make the laptop look good (more on that later). There’s a webcam above, and I really like Lenovo’s built-in privacy cover, which you can turn off by swiping over the webcam. It is these little things that make a device feel well thought out.

Lenovo has used a dark color all over this laptop, which I think looks really nice. The cover is actually the lightest color on the laptop, the bezels are black and the keyboard is a nice dark gray that looks great. It’s also really great to touch. It looks rubbery, though I really don’t think it is, but the best part is, I don’t see any weird fingerprints on this surface under normal use.

On the sides, you get the usual ports (more on that later) along with a power jack and an LED indicator that lights up when charging the laptop.

Overall, Lenovo knocked it out of the park with the design and build of this laptop. It is perfectly plain, although not completely invisible to the eye. This is definitely a laptop that will fit perfectly into work, board meetings, and anywhere you decide to buy it.

view

As for the screen, the IdeaPad Slim 5i comes with a 15.6 inch IPS display with Full HD resolution. You also have a 14-inch option if you want a slightly smaller laptop, but Lenovo sent us the larger one.

It’s a great big screen and it’s bright enough. Although the matte anti-glare coating makes it look a little less shiny; but that’s true of any laptop with a matte screen, and now that I’m sitting at home with lighting not adjusted to real work settings, I appreciate anti-glare screens more.

It’s sharp, and if you only use it for work (that’s what it’s intended for here), it won’t let you down, even if I’m used to a much higher resolution display on my MacBook Pro. By that I mean, unlike some other screens where you can see jagged edges and pixels, text looks crisp and clear on this screen.

This is also a solid image for consuming media content. I’ve used it quite a bit for streaming Netflix and Prime Video shows and it’s pretty great for basically everything.

Yield

I often find myself reviewing gaming laptops, which makes benchmarking and testing easier than usual. You can just play the game and note the performance. However, business laptops are a bit more complex due to the wide variety of workloads you can put under them.

Even here at Beebom, we have people who edit videos in Final Cut Pro, make motion graphics with After Effects, write articles, design graphics for social media, and much more. Frankly, I can’t get this laptop through 4K video editing tasks. What I did was use it as my daily driver for a while, which meant the usual errands I did.

This includes a ton of Edge tabs with Photoshop running in the background, as well as lots of typing, scrolling, editing screenshots, and moving them around. All the while, this laptop doesn’t even break a sweat. It’s also really good at multitasking and doesn’t get too hot. These are all good things.

Frankly, I ran a few benchmarks to get some standard test numbers for you to see as well. As usual, I used 3D Mark and PC Mark to test and here are the results. On the 3D Mark Time Spy, the laptop scores 1091 points and on the PC Mark 10 it scores 4543.

Well, if you want to compare the synthetic performance of this laptop with other laptops, use these numbers and see for yourself what works better for you.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Lenovo has had great keyboards for a while now. I remember reviewing the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i and I really loved this keyboard. This is just as good. The keys are well spaced, meaning you don’t feel cramped when typing, and key travel and response are pretty great.

However, I should point out that this keyboard is slightly less tactile than the keyboard on the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i. It’s not a problem and it doesn’t feel emotional in any way, but there is a difference and you can feel it.

I also appreciate that Lenovo gave us a full-size keyboard on this laptop similar to the IdeaPad Gaming 3i and laptops like the Legion Y540. Two laptops whose keyboards I really like.

In case you were wondering, the keyboard is backlit. You can use Fn + spacebar to change the brightness levels or turn off the backlight if you want.

The only thing I don’t like about this keyboard is the compact arrow key layout. I’m so used to offering Lenovo full-size arrow keys (on both of the laptops I mentioned above) that it’s disappointing. Plus, it’s no secret that compact arrow keys are just… awful.

Other than that pain point, I really like typing on this laptop.

Then there’s the trackpad. While I don’t understand why the trackpad is so far to the left on most Lenovo laptops, this is my personal issue. Other than that, it’s a good trackpad.

While it’s not huge, it’s big enough and also feels pretty responsive. You also get support for Windows gestures, and the trackpad area is definitely big enough to use gestures comfortably.

I don’t have much else to say about this trackpad, but yes, if you’re not that used to using a mouse, if it sounds weird not having a mouse with you, you won’t need a mouse with this laptop.

Ports and Connection

In terms of ports and I/O, this laptop is somewhere between insufficient ports and so many that you don’t know what to do with them. Whether that makes it an excellent port choice is something we can discuss in depth some other time (it isn’t).

However, you get the basic ports you need with this laptop. There are two USB Type-A ports, a USB Type-C port, HDMI, SD card reader, and a headphone/microphone combo.

The Type-C port here supports power delivery, which I love because it can charge devices faster, but I wish there was another USB Type-C port here for further expansion if needed.

For connectivity, Lenovo offers Bluetooth 5.1 and WiFi 6. So if you’re migrating to (or already have) WiFi 6-enabled routers on your network, your laptop is ready for you. I don’t.

battery

Finally the battery. This is where most laptops tend to stumble, right? Laptops in particular work, as they need to offer good battery life as opposed to gaming laptops that usually depend on power for better performance in games.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i comes with a 57Wh battery, which is really huge. This is the same battery you’ll find inside the Legion Y540, a gaming laptop with an RTX 2060 and Core i7 processor. Except that the IdeaPad Slim 5i doesn’t need to power a hungry dedicated GPU. Not to mention that the 11th generation processor is more power efficient than ever before.

What all this means is that the battery life on this laptop is pretty good. Lenovo claims 11 hours of battery life, which sounds pretty good, but in my use I was going somewhere between 9 and 10 hours depending on what I was using the laptop for. If you’re just surfing the web and watching a few YouTube videos, you’ll get around 10 hours of usage time from this laptop.

While that number is good and usually enough to go about your workday unplugged, I always carry the charger with me just in case, and you should probably do that too.

pros and cons

Pros:

• great design
• excellent performance
• good battery life

Cons:

• Compact arrow keys are weird
• Keyboard not as tactile as other Lenovo laptops

Should You Buy the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i?

At the end of the day, the question is whether you should buy the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i. If your workflow is all about documents, typing, web browsing and light Photoshop use, this laptop is perfect for it all. It’s not too heavy, which makes it easy to carry to and from work, and it looks and feels pretty good quality, which is great for the price tag. Rs. 61.990.

Obviously, Mi Notebook Horizon Edition (Rs. 59,999). On the other hand, if you want to play games, you can check out IdeaPad Gaming 3 (Rs. 65,990). Also, the Asus ZenBook 14 is a solid laptop if you’re looking to stretch your budget. Rs. 77,499 additionally.