A beautiful new screen for the Lenovo A730
A new, high-resolution display option, gives Lenovo's other 27-inch all-in-one a competitive jolt.
LAS VEGAS--The Lenovo IdeaCentre A720 was a flagship product for Lenovo last year, adding a relatively polished-looking design to Lenovo's sometimes clunky all-in-one desktop line. The updated 27-inch A730, announced today, brings that same design, along with an option for a truly competitive high-resolution screen.
Prior to the A730, only the Apple iMac and the Dell XPS One 27 had 27-inch displays with a 2,560x1,440-pixel resolution. That high resolution is now an option for the IdeaCentre A730.
The other components in the A730 keep it from competing with those other pixel-dense 27-inchers. The A730 does have an option for the Core i7 chip, and it will also get a bump to Nvidia's forthcoming GeForce 700-series graphics chips. But with a hard-drive limit of 1TB (with an 8GB solid-state caching drive option), and only 8GB of maximum system memory, the A730 won't match the more powerful, multiterabyte, 16GB RAM-equipped configurations of its competition.
Lenovo might counter that those competing PC don't recline to a full 90 degrees, and that that iMac lacks touch-screen input entirely. Those things are true, and those features do help put the A730 in a high-end, lifestyle product niche.
The challenge for Lenovo is that this system will start with a $1,499 price tag and only a standard 1,920x1,080-pixel-resolution display when it hits the market in June. Lenovo has not specified the upgrade price for the higher-resolution display, but the Dell XPS One with a 2,560x1,440-pixel touch screen starts at $1,599. Lenovo could match that price for the high-resolution upgrade. If not, you will have to really prioritize lifestyle computing over a gorgeous screen.