Lenovo IdeaPad Duet
The Chromebook answer to Microsoft’s Surface tablets, this is a seriously versatile – if slow – device
PRICE £249 (£300 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/gb
Google might have given up on the Chrome OS tablet with the demise of the Pixel Slate, but that hasn’t stopped Lenovo. The Ide IdeaPad Duet is a 10.1in Chromeb Chromebook tablet and is supplied with a re rear cover with integral fold-out stand, plus a magnetic clip-on keyboard to turn it into a useful productivity device. Look at the price and you’ll expect the result to be a disaster, but here’s the surprise: while far from perfect, the Duet turns out to be the little wonder of this month’s Labs.
For a start, it’s a well-built little tablet in a fetching two-tone blue and grey design. The shell is plastic, but it feels reasonably robust, is a fraction over 7mm thick and weighs just 450g. Clip Clipping i on the magn magnetic stand cover add adds a few millimetr millimetres to the body and a further 220g to th the weight, b but gives the tablet a little more pro protection and the h handy stand – w we kept it on duri during use. The keyb keyboard, meanwh meanwhile, has a magnetic clip and a pogo pin arrangement for connection, and worked flawlessly during testing every time we snapped it on or off. It sits flat on the desk in use, without the angle of a Microsoft Surface keyboard, but at least this gives you a nice, firm base on which to type.
What’s more, the keyboard itself is surprisingly good. It’s shrunk in size to fit the 10.1in form factor and styled like one of Lenovo’s ThinkPad keyboards. There’s not a lot of travel, but the action is tight and springy. The reduced size also means the touchpad is more adequate then awesome, but it’s still pretty usable – and you can always use the excellent touchscreen if you prefer.
The IPS screen is similarly small, but otherwise superb by budget
Chromebook standards. It’s bright at a maximum 396cd/m2 and covers 99.6% of the sRGB colour space, with decent colour accuracy – we measured the average Delta E at 2.42. The size means it’s not ideal for heavy multitasking – having more than one window or tab open on the desktop involves a lot of squinting – but it’s brilliant for basic productivity tasks, browsing, video chats and playing games or watching films, where the h f form f factor means ans it’s as handy on the sofa as it is on the e desk. As a tablet, let, the Duet has two cameras, with a standard d 2MP fixed focus us webcam on the front for video calls and meetings, , plus an 8MP autofocus ocus camera on the he back for snaps. The webcam works well across most sensible lighting conditions, even coping with bright sunlight streaming in from a window. The rear camera is better than you might expect too, delivering clear and well-exposed images g of the sort y you’d get from a half-decent budg budget smartphone.
Co Connectivity is arg arguably the bigge biggest comp compromise here. You g get a single USB- USB-C 3.1 port and that’ that’s it. However, you c can connect a mous mouse over Bluet Bluetooth 4.2 and you’v you’ve already got a keyboard, so the only thing you’re missing is a microSD card slot, which would have bolstered the 64GB of eMMC flash.
Does Chrome OS make sense on a tablet? A couple of years ago we had our doubts; the OS wasn’t that touch-friendly and neither were most web-based apps. Now, however, the OS has improved to make more use of gestures for navigation and appswitching, while Android apps – especially the few that have been optimised for tablets – give you more software to work with. In practice, you still tend to switch between Android apps for media and content consumption and Chrome and web-based apps for productivity, but the choice is there, and the Duet gives you the best of both worlds.
The best, that is, as long as you’re realistic about its performance. It’s based on a MediaTek Helio P60T processor running four ARM Cortex A-73 cores and four Cortex A-53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. It’s a decent multitasking platform, albeit aimed mainly at smartphones, and its teamed with 4GB of RAM. However, it also means that the Duet is one of the slowest devices in this Labs.
This isn’t a disaster, though. When browsing, watching videos and tapping out documents, we never found the Duet painfully tardy, y and d we didn’t encounter the pauses you u sometimes find with theoretically more powerful dual-core Celeron machines. There’s also payback in the battery life: the Duet kept pushing on through our test for a staggering 16hrs 14mins. If you want a cheap, versatile le all-rounder then hen buy away.
“There’s also a little payback in the battery life: the Duet kept pushing on through our test for a staggering 16hrs 14mins”