Lenovo 3000 Y500 Notebook

By now, you must have gotten used to logging into your notebook using

smartcards and fingerprint scanners. It's now time to prepare yourself for other

biometric security techniques. The platinum silver colored Lenovo 3000 Y500

notebook goes a step ahead and lets you login with your face as your

credentials. It comes with a software called VeriFace to do the honors. We tried

to use this feature in many different ways and got some interesting results. The

software requires your nose, mouth, and chin to be visible while logging in.

Covering any of these may not log you in. It needs good lighting conditions to

work, and sometimes it gives problems in logging people in with specs. However,

we'd just like to point out that it's a new concept and a good attempt to

introduce something different in the market. Possibly this is just the beginning

and one will see much more robust face recognition systems in the future.

Moreover, even if the software doesn't recognize your face, you always have the

password route available for you to login. You can even disable it completely,

and get the regular password login screen. The technology requires that your

account have a non-blank password and if you change your password, you should

re-enroll your face as well.

The notebook has a 15.4” WXGA screen that gives it a wide form factor, and

allows for a maximum resolution of 1280x800. It weighs 2.5 kilos, which is fine

for a wide screen format notebook. The Y500 is meant to be a multimedia

notebook, and for that it comes integrated with Dolby Home Theatre system with a

2.5W sub-woofer and two 2 X 2 W speakers. Plus, it comes with a custom UI

created by Lenovo known as the Lenovo Shuttle Center.It resembles the Windows

Media Center interface. You can use it along with its integrated TV-tuner to

watch television (including set-top box cable) and even record video. It even

comes with a remote control for the TV Tuner.

The notebook has 'iGRS', a profile-based feature that creates profiles for

all wired and wireless networks that it comes across and roams between them

seamlessly when you move around. Other than this, it has integrated Bluetooth,

10/100 Mbps Ethernet, a VGA port, a 4-in-1 card reader, Cardbus slot, and 3 USB

ports. Incidentally, the old Access IBM button in the ThinkPads has been

replaced by a button called Lenovo Care button. This is also used for one-push

recovery, but initially, we mistook it for the power button. We also tried using

the VGA out to connect to an external monitor. When we've done this with other

wide screen notebooks, we found that the screen resolution goes for a toss. In

this notebook, we didn't find any such problem. While the notebook screen showed

its regular wide screen resolution, on the monitor screen it happily worked at

1024x768 resolution.

Performance wise, we found it almost on par with the similarly configured

Wipro Little Genius WLG7120 that we reviewed last month. The scores are as

follows: 36.6 Business Winstones, 2940 PCMarks, 401 3DMarks (in 3DMark 2005) and

98 3DMarks (in 3DMark 2006). The battery lasted a good 3 hours and 30 minutes.

If this notebook can do this well against the WLG7120 with half a gig of RAM

less and a lower-speed processor compared to the Wipro notebook, imagine what it

could do with 1 GB RAM. Plus of course, it has a wider screen, and a host of

multimedia features. The best thing about the notebook is that it comes for just

around 60K. At this price, it packs in a lot more features as compared to many

other notebooks out there.

Bottom Line: This notebook is a steal at this price and configuration,

especially if you want good business productivity as well as multimedia in one

product.