Lenovo Flex 2 (15-Inch)

Lenovo Flex 2 (15-inch) ($ 679.99, as tested) is a desktop-replacement laptop in every sense of the word. It is large, with a 15.6-inch touch screen, and offers plenty of connectivity and entertainment features, including the DVD drive. Due to its bulk and relatively short battery life, it is best to put on a desk in your den or even on your kitchen counter. The Flex 2's plethora of features, including a unique 300-degree folding touch screen, excellent performance in our benchmark tests, and reasonable price help it to earn our Editor's Choice 'for entry into level of desktop-replacement laptop.

Design and Features
The screen hinge is a little beefier than usual. It is a larger iterations of hinge concept introduced last year to Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 14 can push the screen back past the 180-degree mark in almost 300 degrees, allowing you to position the system with screen facing out and facing the keyboard down on a table. It lets you use Flex 2 to stand mode, with part of the keyboard effectively acting as a stand for the touch screen.

The black-on-black chassis quite hard, with a horizontal-etched texture molded into the palm rest and keyboard deck. The backlit keyboard is somewhat convex-curved keys that make typing comfortable, although there is a hint of Flex. Touch typists will enjoy the full range of buttons, as well as built-in numeric keypad on the right. The one-piece touchpad is easy to use.

The focus of the interface is the 10-point touch screen. It responds quickly, and it is clear and bright enough to see in a well-lit room. The 15.6-inch display with 1920-by-1080 resolution, with more virtual real estate than the screen of 1,366-by-768-resolution 14 Flex Lenovo, Acer Aspire M5-583P-6637, and the Acer Aspire V5 -573PG-9610. The 1080p HD video I viewed during the test will look clear and detailed, and gives you ample screen space for large spreadsheets or layouts school projects. Placing the screen in stand mode is a boon for playing games and watching movies. Lenovo recommends the app pops up when you move from mode to mode laptop stand, with a list of programs that work well with each other.

The speaker volume is loud, a bit thin-sounding. It will certainly fill a midsize room with audio for movies and music light Bass. The sound from the speakers can be likened to a Las Vegas buffet: It is sufficient, but not superior quality and pretty satisfying, plus lots of it.

Port is also plentiful, with an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, an SD card reader, a pair of USB 2.0 ports, and a single USB 3.0 port. The system has a DVD burner, so you can watch old movies or to load the older software. If you prefer to stream your movies and programs, you can do so via the 802.11b / g / n Wi-Fi.

All of the functionality it adds girth, however: The Flex 2 (15-inch) is bulky compared to lithe 10 ounce tablet. It is not as much of a drawback as it is for an entry-level ultrabook like Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch, but size 11 Flex 2 by 15 by 1.06 inches (HWD) and 5.56 -pound weight make frequent travel a bit uncomfortable. It is a system for homebodies.

The spacious 500GB hard drive with 8GB solid-state drive (SSD) cache for performance. There's also plenty of free space on the drive when you take it out of the box, but there are several pre-installed programs worth note. Start screen, you can see the Accuweather, eBay, Evernote, hightail, Kindle, and Zinio. You'll also see Lenovo Companion Phone, which lets you pair an Android phone to laptop to share contacts, photos, messages, and the like. Budget about an hour to remove all the programs you do not want to use. The system has a one-year warranty.