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Medion, a company better known for pushing inexpensive laptops through the Aldi supermarket chain, is currently selling a 15.6in, Intel Ivy Bridge-based, Core i7 -Medion Akoya P6635 (MD 98068) laptop directly to the public. The company is testing the waters with this laptop, and is keen to find out if a high-performance configuration will sell just as well as its mid-range, mainstream offerings have in the past. Because it’s an inexpensive unit, you shouldn’t expect too much from it when it comes to overall user comfort. It’s a fairly well built laptop for what it is, but it just doesn’t feel as good as more expensive models. Primarily, its screen has narrow vertical viewing angles and could use better contrast. Its Synaptics touchpad, while responsive and accurate, is also very small (80x49mm) and almost blends in with the palm rest. The Laptop Keyboard is decent overall, but it does have chiclet keys that feel slightly spongy, and a number pad and arrow keys that are squashed to fit. We didn’t have much trouble typing on it though and think it’s good enough to use if you’re a writer. It’s not an overly heavy notebook; it has a weight of 2.5kg, which is currently typical for a 15.6in notebook. The overall look of the notebook is decent and there is nothing gaudy about the design at all. The palm rest and touchpad share the same pattern like the Lenovo Keyboard does , but the texture of the pad is slightly different to the palm rest — it needs to be, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish the two. There is a glossy trim around the LED-backlit LCD screen, but the bezel and the screen itself are not glossy; the screen has a matte finish that won’t reflect light sources. On the left edge of the Medion, you’ll fine two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, VGA and Gigabit Ethernet (from Realtek). The front has an SD card slot, while the right side has a built-in DVD burner, separate microphone and headphone ports, Laptop Keyboard and two USB 2.0 ports. This array of features should suit most users’ needs. You also get a built-in webcam, Bluetooth and 802.11n Wi-Fi (via an Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230 module). The Wi-Fi doesn’t support dual-band operation, but it does support Intel WiDi, which can be convenient when you want to watch content from your laptop on your big screen TV (you’ll need an adapter such as the Belkin ScreenCast TV to do this). Conclusion When the performance of the $899 Medion is put up against more expensive laptops with similar configurations, such as the ASUS N56VM ($1399) and HP Pavilion dv6-7030tx ($1699) which owns compact HP Pavilion Keyboard , the only drawback is its disk speed and responsiveness. We noticed that the Medion was sometimes sluggish when launching applications and also when booting (it took 51sec to cold boot). It doesn’t have a solid state drive to act as a cache and make the system more responsive, whereas other modern laptops do. There is a Mini PCIe slot available, but Medion doesn’t have any data yet on whether a solid state drive can be used as a cache drive (nor did we have a drive to hand for testing at the time of writing). For more laptop reviews
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