Lenovo Ideacentre Stick 300: Small Yes

    Hello! How many computers do you have at home? Smartphones will not be considered, although this is not entirely correct, but still. Two? Three? Five? We have another one in your collection, so to speak. And his name is Lenovo Ideacentre Stick 300. We offer you to get to know each other and find out what this smart HDMI flash drive is capable of ... Since its inception, computers, in addition to constantly increasing computing power, have steadily followed the trend of decreasing footprint. Simply put, decreased in size. At some point, it became possible to make the PC wearable and a whole new direction in the industry appeared - laptops. Today, portable electronics is constantly expanding its




    presence in our lives - more and more users are abandoning traditional PCs in favor of a laptop or tablet, and some even try to control just one smartphone everywhere.

    Supercompact computers, which have been offered on the market for some time now, can boast indecently small sizes, but until recently, the ARM architecture and, accordingly, the operating system, Android / ChromeOS, remained the main drawback of such systems. Not so long ago, thanks primarily to the efforts of Intel, this milestone was finally submitted to the Microsoft operating system, which is familiar to most users.

    Our guest today is precisely the representative of the “pioneers” of such computers, and we will try to examine in detail its characteristics and capabilities.

    Appearance, scope of delivery


    The device comes in a small box, which in size is no larger than the standard packaging of modern not the largest smartphones.



    Inside you will find:

    • Ideacentre Stick 300 itself;
    • USB cord (A-MicroUSB), 100 cm;
    • Power Supply;
    • HDMI extension cable, 21 cm;
    • Manual.



    Frankly, the equipment is not the richest, but there is a minimum set for the successful launch of the device. It would be possible to put an SD card on XX GB, but Lenovo decided not to. The reason is not clear, but if you take into account the relative cheapness of the SD cards themselves "on sale" and the very good amount of internal storage (32 GB), then the urgent need for an additional card "out of the box" somehow disappears at once.

    I would also like to say “thank you” for the HDMI extension cable carefully put into the box, as practice has shown - it is very useful when connecting to different TVs / monitors when the device is actively moving.

    Characteristics

    A little about the stick itself. Dry numbers, so to speak:

    Weight: 65 g
    WxDxH (mm): 100x38x15



    What is available from input-output ports? The set is not the richest, but, again, to begin with, more than one mini-HDMI-out port, one USB 2.0 port, one Micro USB port (for power supply), one microSD slot.




    What's inside?


    The heart of the device is the Intel Atom Z3735F processor - a quad-core 64-bit Bay Trail with a 2MB L2 cache. You can get acquainted with the full characteristics of the "stone" here .


    RAM - 2 GB DDR3L, built-in drive - 32 GB eMMC, made by Kingston, video subsystem - Intel HD Graphics, WiFi module - Realtek RTL8723BS, which supports 802.11 b / g / n, as well as Bluetooth 4.0.

    By default, the device has 32-bit Microsoft Windows 8.1 with Bing installed, this is even stated on the device’s packaging. You can upgrade to Windows 10 (for free), the system itself will offer this some time after the start. It should be noted that with Windows 8.1 installed, the amount of free space is 20+ GB. Part of the disk (about 4 GB) is used for the recovery partition, while on the working partition about 5 GB is occupied by the OS.





    Interesting fact:the system starts with software designed for digital kiosks and interactive advertising stands - AddReality. It can be used both for personal needs and in the field of trade, for example.

    In work


    In operation, the device is absolutely silent (despite active cooling), it heats poorly (without any super serious loads). A blue diode on the front panel indicates that the Stick is on. Responsiveness of the system interface at the level of "works well and does not slow down." Opens office documents without difficulty, web pages - and even more so.

    Video (file 3.5 GB, 1080p) is played without brakes and pauses, playback was carried out from a network drive via WiFi.

    Speaking of video, the hardware acceleration of decoding, which is present here thanks to Intel HD Graphics, copes with various file formats with a bang, it is nice and allows you to significantly relieve the CPU.

    To play? Perhaps such a thing! Unfortunately, we didn’t find a suitable “for verification” distribution, but we found something on YouTube:



    This, of course, is not BioShock, but you can pass the time yourself. Well, all sorts of AngryBirds, of course, run without any problems at all.

    Performance Assessment Results


    Winsat Formal:



    7Zip:



    CrystalDiskMark:



    Why all this?


    The first thought that comes to mind when you play enough with Ideacentre Stick is “Why?”
    A good question, the answer to which everyone who needs a mobile device with the capabilities of a full-fledged computer has the right to find for itself.

    Due to its compact size and sufficient performance, the mass of applications for the device:

    • video conferencing facilities;
    • information stands;
    • Smart TV
    • reception desks, exhibitions;
    • PC for business trip;
    • media centers for public transport;
    • the medicine;
    • CCTV;
    • accounting (with some restrictions);
    • your option ...

    For example, we seriously thought about using the Ideacentre Stick as a media player paired with network storage.

    Of course, it will not work to encode HD video or calculate the weather on Stick - Atom is not enough for these purposes, but the device copes with tasks easier, as they say, with all the money. By the way, the gadget is quite inexpensive - about 10,000 rubles .

    Competitors? First of all, these are compact devices on Chrome OS and Remix OS. Analogs? Of course, there are those too. For example, the reference Intel Compute Stick or the Polish MODECOM FreePC. However, FreePC offers only 16 GB of memory on board and support for microSDHC (64 GB is the limit), and competitors cannot boast of the familiar Windows pre-installed OS.

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