Lenovo Chromebook Duet review
Our Verdict
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet is a long lasting 2-in-1 that actually includes its keyboard.
For
- Excellent battery life
- Sharp, colorful screen
- Surprisingly affordable
- Especially with keyboard included
- ChromeOS tablet optimizations
Against
- Cramped keyboard
- Hinge is a fleck flimsy
Tom's Guide Verdict
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet is a long lasting 2-in-one that really includes its keyboard.
Pros
- +
Excellent battery life
- +
Sharp, colorful screen
- +
Surprisingly affordable
- +
Especially with keyboard included
- +
ChromeOS tablet optimizations
Cons
- -
Cramped keyboard
- -
Hinge is a scrap flimsy
Lenovo Chromebook Duet Specs
Price: $249 (64GB eMMC)
CPU: ii.0GHz octa-core MediaTek Helio P60T
Graphics: ARM G72 MP3
Brandish: 10.1 inches, 1920 x 1200 pixels
Retentivity: 4GB
Storage: 64GB eMMC, 128GB eMMC
Size: 9.64 10 half-dozen.66 x 0.71 inches (docked)
Weight: two pounds (docked)
Ports: USB-C
Wi-Fi: 802.eleven a/b/g/n/ac
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet is, in a way, exactly what I've wanted Apple tree and Microsoft (among others) to release. It'due south a $249 tablet with a detachable keyboard that comes included by default, so you're not paying extra for the laptop experience. We're also pretty impressed by its fantastic battery life, as well as some neat new tablet optimizations for Chrome.
The biggest problem I found while writing this Lenovo Chromebook Duet review is that its typing feel is hampered by a weird keyboard layout and weak-feeling keys. That being said, the Lenovo Chromebook Duet'south a must-consider for families looking for a shared device around the house; the low price tag, packed-in keyboard, and lengthy battery life effectively make it one of the best two-in-1 laptops you tin buy when price is paramount. It'due south and so expert, in fact, that it won the award for all-time budget laptop and a recommendation for best Chromebook in our Tom's Guide Awards 2021.
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Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Price and availability
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet came out in May 2020, with an original MSRP of $279.
Lenovo at present sells the Chromebook Duet for $249. A year of accidental damage protection bumps the pricing up to $271.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Design
The Chromebook Duet is an all-in-one package, but y'all can see where some costs were cut to get to that $249 starting price. For example, the kickstand it uses to stand up upright isn't every bit strong or rigid as that of the Surface Go ii.
While its tablet beat out is fabricated of aluminum alloy — which is dandy, don't get me incorrect — that material is hidden past the overall casing, every bit the back plate has a material material and its keyboard's underside is plastic. Afterward attaching the keyboard and back embrace slice to the tablet, and belongings information technology in my hands, I immediately noticed how the keyboard didn't want to stay in identify, and moved around as I held the docked tablet and keyboard in my hands.
The setup process, connecting the tablet, embrace and keyboard, couldn't be easier. The fabric-covered back plate snaps on with potent magnets, and the keyboard attaches magnetically also, connecting to the tablet via pogo pin connectors — just like the Surface Go Type Comprehend and iPad Smart Keyboard. Detaching the tablet from the cover and keyboard is 1 step likewise complicated, every bit y'all have to remove each item separately.
The Chromebook Duet's encompass is necessary considering you demand its kickstand, which works most of the time but feels a picayune frustrating. Several times when trying to deploy the kickstand, I've pulled on the entire back plate, because the piddling edge where your fingers are supposed to catch onto for the kickstand is ever so slight, almost as if they're optimized for kids' fingers.
Minus the keyboard and dorsum plate, the Chromebook Duet tablet measures 0.3 inches thick and weighs just under a pound. That's slightly lighter than the 2019 10.two-inch iPad (0.three inches, 1.one pounds) and the Surface Go 2 (one.ii pounds, 0.three inches). Attached, the Chromebook Duet measures 0.7 inches thick and weighs 2.i pounds, which makes information technology lighter than the Samsung Chromebook 4 (0.7 inches, two.6 pounds).
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Ports
Lenovo's gone a bit low-cal on ports, keeping it unproblematic with only a single USB-C, which y'all'll use for charging and connecting any accessories, such as the included headphone adapter. Power and volume buttons sit on that same edge.
That USB-C port supported the USB-C hub I use to extend my MacBook Pro's brandish, providing a dual-screen experience and letting me use my wired keyboard and wireless mouse with the Duet. The only flaw I hit in that location was that keyboard shortcuts didn't piece of work as anticipated, then I'd need to download a central mapping extension for customization.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Display
Watching the Fast & Furious 9 trailer on the Chromebook Duet's ten.ane-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel panel, I noted crisp moving picture quality and solid color reproduction. The panel is sharp enough for me to meet the interlocking links of Dom's silver concatenation (even when viewed from a distance) and his crimson ruby-red tractor rendered accurately. Similarly, forest ferns surrounding a humvee rendered in a verdant green and Dom's long-sleeve shirts bore a well-baked white, as if they were fresh out of the wash.
Our colorimeter rates the Chromebook Duet as producing 106% of the sRGB spectrum, which is close to the 105% rating from the iPad and the 107% rating from the Surface Go 2. The Samsung Chromebook iv notched a lowly 64%.
The Chromebook Duet emits up to 372 nits, which enables a wide range of viewing angles, as I saw colors but slightly darken when I viewed videos from over 30 degrees to the left and right. The Duet proved brilliant enough for articulate movie quality, but not strong enough to eliminate the glare and reflections picked up from natural lighting in every spot in my flat. The iPad (450 nits) and Surface Go 2 (408 nits) get brighter, while the Samsung Chromebook 4 is much dimmer.
Navigating the net and Chrome Os, I found the Chromebook Duet's touchscreen brandish accurate at registering touches and swipes. Dragging icons around the screen, I noticed a petty flake of lag, especially moving apps around the drawer, only it'southward the kind of functioning issue you tin can accept at this price.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Keyboard and touchpad
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet'southward keyboard will be great for some, and catchy for others. I clicked my style to 67 words per minute with 90 percent accuracy on the 10fastfingers typing test. That's a bit of a fall from my 80 wpm/98% averages, and I attribute those dips to the keys non having much feedback at all and how the layout feels a lilliputian cramped.
Those with smaller hands, specially children, might not mind the keyboard layout, but I rapidly realized I'd take a tough time. That'due south considering of the keyboard's comma, period, minus, equals, bracket, semicolon and apostrophe keys are all narrower than the normal keys. I'd probably adjust to it if a parent handed me this keyboard when I was a kid, but I have no affinity for this keyboard today.
The Chromebook Duet's three.4 x 1.nine-inch touchpad proved acceptable at enabling scrolling web pages and navigating Chrome Os. I even discovered that ChromeOS has a "see all open apps" office, where you swipe upwardly with three fingers.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Audio
Listening to Fiona Apple's album "Fetch the Bolt-cutters," fill up my relatively large living room on the Chromebook Duet, I fabricated notes well-nigh the practiced, the bad, and the not-there. While her vocals were clear and crisp plenty, high pitched instruments sounded a niggling sharp and the anthology's bass was non real.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Functioning
The Chromebook Duet runs on a Mediatek Helio P60T 2.0GHz octa-core CPU and 4GB of RAM, which provides enough speed for light multitasking. I was worried nearly how poor information technology would perform (Mediatek processors take never inspired much confidence), so I started off irksome, splitting my screen between a 1080p YouTube video of J. Kenji López-Alt cooking smashburgers and a few Chrome tabs.
The Duet stayed snappy and responsive as I moved between tabs and scrolled upwards and downwardly. Performance stayed reliable as I added more tabs, including the Google Medico for this review. But one time I hit xi tabs open alongside cooking videos, the Duet started to lag. Tabs paused slightly while loading, equally I navigated betwixt them. The bigger frustration I constitute came while watching YouTube, as it took most 2.5 seconds for videos to resize.
Benchmark testing showed how the Chromebook Duet is outclassed past the slightly more expensive competitors. For example, the Duet earned a five,526 on the Geekbench four general performance benchmark (running via Google Play emulation), which savage under the 6,815 from the Surface Go 2 (Intel 8th Gen Cadre m3 processor, 8GB of RAM), but in a higher place the 3,613 from the Samsung Chromebook 4 (Intel Celeron 3000N processor and 4GB of RAM).
On the JetStream 2 benchmark, which tests web browser application functioning, the Chromebook Duet posted a 31.9. That's less than the 49 from the Samsung Chromebook 4, the 74.9 from the Surface Go 2 and a fraction of the iPad'southward 91.9. The WebXPRT 3 exam, which tests with HTML5 and JavaScript-based scenarios, handed the Chromebook Duet a score of 58. The iPad (92) and Surface Get ii (139) posted much higher scores.
To test its gaming chops, I downloaded two Android games: the cartoonish Alto's Take chances and the more-realistic Asphalt 9 racing game. While both ran at playable speeds (neither is exactly ultra demanding), the latter ran with a small-scale stutter, fifty-fifty in its opening credits.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Bombardment Life
The Chromebook Duet provides serious endurance, enough to be passed effectually the family all 24-hour interval long. On our bombardment test (spider web surfing at 150 nits), the Duet posted a time of 12 hours and 47 minutes, which beats the iPad (10:07), the Surface Go two (11:38) and the Samsung Chromebook 4 (ten:36).
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Webcam and camera
Tablets are not great cameras, and neither is the Lenovo Chromebook Duet. Yes, even in the work from home era, the ii-megapixel front-facing photographic camera is all-time described every bit adequate. Selfies I shot on the slate evidence that while you lot'll look recognizable, at that place won't be much detail, so don't look this to exist the device y'all shoot your quarantine vlog on.
The rear-mounted 8MP camera in the Duet is also not swell, especially when daylight hits its sensors. When I took it exterior for a brief walk in downtown Manhattan, all the shots I took were done out or blown out, if the bluish sky was involved. Only closeups of flowers looked at all decent, though they lacked detail, with a fuzzy look.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: ChromeOS evolves for tablets
Chrome OS' start big pivot was to Android apps, with Google Play access. The Lenovo Chromebook Duet marks the platform's push button to touch, with tablet mode optimizations you'll only see when the keyboard is detached. My favorite of these features is the new tabs interface in Chrome. Tap the number box (a one within a box, if y'all accept no tabs) and y'all'll open upwards a row of tabs at the peak of the screen, with a big + push button for new tabs. Information technology's a great fashion to make use of the large tablet screen.
Navigation gestures (edge swipes to get backwards and frontward) aren't really a big revelation, only I am happy to encounter that web apps in Chrome act like their mobile app counterparts. Take YouTube, for example, where taps on the left and correct sides of the screen rewind and fast forward. I still want Desktop Chrome to offer this.
While y'all've been able to split the ChromeOS screen between 2 windows, they've added a new elevate and drop manner to exercise information technology. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to run into the black bar, which shows you all of your open windows. Then, drag open windows to each side of the screen.
Google Assistant'southward still proving clever in ChromeOS. The pair of far-field microphones in the Chromebook Duet make it easier to set things up past proverb "OK, Google," and making some exact commands. When I asked about my calendar appointments for the rest of the week, it even got a petty cute, maxim "At 6pm tomorrow you accept yoga, namaste."
Lenovo Chromebook Duet review: Verdict
This Lenovo Chromebook Duet review shows why it should garner deserved attention for its value proffer, giving you a 2-in-1 with a solid screen and long endurance for less than the iPad or Surface Go 2 cost, before their keyboards. If only its keyboard weren't so cramped and its swivel felt a fleck more than solid.
Those who opt for the Surface Become two for its faster operation and superior two-in-1 design, you lot'll be dropping nearly an hr of battery life and paying at least $221 more after throwing in the Blazon Cover keyboard. Merely for families looking for a device that everyone can utilise, from kids watching YouTube to parents drafting emails, the Lenovo Chromebook Duet is a compelling selection.
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Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/lenovo-chromebook-duet
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