Lenovo ThinkPad T550 REview

Portability be damned; sometimes you want a laptop that includes a big, beautiful display, along with a full keyboard. Not everybody needs a laptop designed for hauling around all day, and the Lenovo ThinkPad T550 is one such laptop that will happily reside on your desk for the better part of its life. However, it faces stiff competition from both MSI and Toshiba in the 15.6 inch format, so let’s see if the T550 has what it takes to come out on top. As mentioned, this isn’t an ultraportable laptop built with slim lines or a low weight in mind; it’s a full-sized bruiser. Weighing 2.13kg, it’s actually the lightest of the 15.6 inch laptops that we reviewed, but only by a relatively small margin. Despite its relatively large dimensions, it remains rather shallow, with a maximum depth of just 22mm. The entire external chassis is built from rough black plastic, which doesn’t exactly lend it a premium feel, yet it doesn’t feel like it’s about to fall apart if it takes a tumble from your desk.

 A result of the large display is the ability to include a nice, large keyboard. Lenovo has gone with the chiclet design favored by most laptop makers, and it feels nice and sturdy despite the plastic chassis, with no fl ex in the center of the keyboard. This just happens to be the same spot where Lenovo has included a pointing nub, a quaint inclusion targeted at the few users who prefer a nub to the touchpad. If you’d prefer to use the touchpad instead, the one featured here is reasonably accurate, though it does feel like the mouse cursor stutters a little when the touchpad is used. A unique inclusion on the T550 is the fingerprint reader to the right of the touchpad, a nod to this machine’s corporate leanings. The large 15.6 inch display is surrounded by a thick border of around a centimeter of plastic; compared to the edgeless designs used elsewhere it presents as rather old fashioned. It’s a 1920 x 1080 display, which is about as low as we’d like to see a screen of this size go. The display in our model is apparently an LED screen, yet it displays surprisingly decent field of view performance, with minimal color and brightness shifting at obtuse viewing angles. It’s a little washed out compared to the better displays seen here though.

With such a large chassis, Lenovo has plenty of room to stock the T550 with goodies, and it has opted for an interesting CPU in the Intel i5-5200U. This twin-cored, HyperThreaded beast has a base speed of 2.2GHz base, yet reaches just 2.7GHz when Intel’s Turbo mode kicks in, making it one of the lesser CPUs in our roundup… on paper at least. It’s paired with a rather meagre 4GB of DDR3 1600 memory, which is more than enough to run the elderly Windows 7 Pro Operating System that comes by default with this machine, again showing that it’s intended for corporate environs that are likely running the older version of Windows. Forget any form of SSD, as the T550 uses a 500GB mechanical drive. Thankfully it’s a Hybrid drive with an 8GB cache, helping to slightly boost it out of the doldrums of standard mechanical drive performance.

In fact, it performed admirably despite the lack of an SSD and deficit in memory, as evidenced by our benchmarks. In the PCMark 8 Home benchmark, the hardware combination delivered the second fastest performance in the roundup, showing that the i5 CPU is a capable processor compared to the leaner offerings used elsewhere. It was third fastest in the Office benchmark, and also delivered excellent battery performance in our final benchmark, with a result of 395 minutes. This makes it the second best performer in terms of battery life, proving it’s capable of going a full day without needing to find a power point. With these excellent performance results, we can forgive the T550’s rather average overall presentation. It might not look like a premium machine thanks to its fondness for plastic in the construction, but it turned in blazing benchmark results, showing that this is a capable performer for those looking for a large, desktop replacement laptop.