Lenovo Ideapad Duet Chromebook

Lenovo’s latest Chromebook is showing Windows 10S what it should look like.

We were pretty blown away by Lenovo’s Ideapad Duet Chromebook. If you put it next to a Microsoft Surface Go 2, you’d notice that the Chromebook’s keyboard was fractionally harder to type on, the back panel stand made it a little heavier and they run different operating systems, but that’s not a lot when the Surface Go 2 starts at $629 (or $829 with keyboard) and the Ideapad Duet Chromebook comes with keypad and stand case for $599.

While we definitely prefer the hardware from Microsoft, Chrome OS is a much richer operating system than Windows 10S to use with a lightweight 2-in-1, especially if you already use Gmail or any of the other G Suite apps. That said, the 10.1-inch 1920 x 1200 pixel display looks vibrant and offers a 400nit peak brightness and other than the overly small right hand side keys the keyboard is easy enough to type on and comes with a nicely sized, smooth-to-touch trackpad.

If you’re a tab hoarder, you’ll probably hit the upper limits of the device’s MediaTek P60T eight-core processor and the 4GB of RAM pretty quickly, but anyone who’s happy to keep things to just a handful of tabs shouldn’t really have any issues. Battery life was good too, lasting five hours and 31 minutes in gaming benchmarks and seven hours and 45 minutes in 1080p movie playback.

There are a couple of minor setbacks like the single USB Type-C port and a slow ~100MB/s flash memory at 128GB without the option for microSD card expansion, but at least Google offers 100GB of online storage to new users, which alleviates some of the pain here.

A great device that makes work easy for anyone on a tight budget

“If you’re a tab hoarder, you’ll probably hit the upper limits of the device’s MediaTek P60T eight-core processor and the 4GB of RAM pretty quickly.”