Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the Lenovo ideas Center a 720 so this is a pretty high-end on one from Lenovo it has a lot of touch oriented features on it that make it kind of an interesting system you can see it has a nice big screen here it's a 27-inch display although it's only 19 by 10 it's also a multi-touch screen they can recognize up to 10 different points of input at once now on top of all that well Nova has also designed a case so the screen is really adjustable in fact you can drop it all the way down so it sits flat you can put it on a coffee table or some central location and get sort of a party atmosphere going around your touch screen I guess there's a couple games that come with the system that work well like this particularly air hockey this game is called wang and it sort of is like pong actually the idea though is that you use your hands to create two different paddles and you can play against an opponent and you'd hit a ball back and forth object is to get the ball across the other side of the screen so the touch features work actually pretty well and the fact that you can lie down the screen flat seems to create some interesting opportunities for how you might be able to use this system the problem though is that there aren't that many apps available for it you can see here sort of this idea touch environment that lenovo has they've broken it down into six different groups you've got music files videos photos on with games widgets and up here you get ebooks now all those are media files you can feed in and certainly take advantage of those but in terms of specific apps you're limited to what Lenovo provides you here the biggest part of the Apple ever though is the games so we blow that up here we can see some of the titles are familiar there's Angry Birds there's fruit ninja air hockey certainly makes sense and there's some other games you may have seen before so by releasing this system if she wants a head of Windows 8 it really seems like the novel is trying to capitalize on that touch base PC demand the problem though is that as soon as one of those eight launches they're most likely going to be other own ones out there that have big touch screens so the best advice then is probably to wait before spending a whole lot of money on a big touchscreen PC right now so another problem with this system is that because it has this fancy design and multi-touch input it doesn't quite have the core computing features we like to see in a system in this price range so again this cost about 1450 for this particular model and for that price we expect terabyte hard drives seven CPUs decent graphics cards this system though only has a core i5 chip a 500 gigabyte hard drive and really a budget graphics card from a video now it's fast enough for everyday use and you can play mainstream games on it but it doesn't quite have that oomph we like to see in a higher-end all-in-one there's a series of touch activated buttons down here in the bottom edge of the display to give you volume display controls as well as the ability to swap the signal to the HDMI input that's a great feature we've done over at a lot of times before basically what it does is it lets you connect an external video source into the system you use it as a standalone monitor note over here in the spar side there's also a blu-ray drive which is a great feature and there's a couple ports that are useful particularly USB 3 there's no digital audio output which is a little disappointing but overall it's a well-equipped home entertainment system all that said that I really can't recommend the system because so much of its value is tied up in its ability as a touch PC and with other high-end touch focused all in one's coming out closer the launch of Windows 8 it makes far more sense to wait before spending a lot of money right now one more thing I'd like to add is that have had a few readers asked to put Windows 8 on the system and write up that experience so I'm gonna do that and there's not going to be that within the context of the review since when it was 8 isn't final yet it doesn't actually ship on this system so it wouldn't be quite appropriate to incorporate that into the rating but stay tuned and we'll have some windows 8 based content on the system hopefully soon so I'm rich Brown this is the Lenovo idea center a 720