Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Chromebook
Incredibly cheap andd surprisingly nipp nippy, but the compromises co couldld be a step too far
PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/gb
If there’s one good reason to get excited about the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Chromebook, it’s the price. £180 is an astonishingly tiny amount to pay for a fully featured laptop, even one with a basic specification and an 11.6in screen.
So, is it the bargain of the century or a cut-price duffer we should warn you off? Inevitably, the truth lies somewhere in between. In terms of the physical design, Lenovo has made the best of a limited budget. The allplastic construction feels cheap, but there’s a nice two-tone effect on the lid, which itself isn’t as weak and flexible as on certain other budget Chromebooks. Bar the massive bezel below the screen, it’s not a badlooking device. Connectivity isn’t a problem, either, with two USB-A 3 and two USB-C 3 ports.
Where you start lowering expectations is with the screen. A bog-standard 1,366 x 76 768 resolution isn’t a problem on an 11. 11.6in display, but the one here isn’t very bright – Lenovo claims cla 250cd/m2, but our tests s say closer to 200cd/m2 – wit with awful vertical and horizontal viewing angl angles. Colour reproduction is exactly what you would expect xpect from a sub-£200 laptop – so pretty awful – while the sound ound is hard on the ears at any real al volume.
That’s a shame, because otherwise erwise the IdeaPad 3 Chromebook mebook is surprisingly usable. The keyboard eyboard doesn’t have Lenovo’s usual premium look and feel, but the flat keys ys have a fine, crisp action with no wobbles bbles or flexing in the middle, while the touchpad is slick and accurate. te. Meanwhile, battery life is very respectable, spectable, with the Lenovo surviving ing for well over 11 hours of video playback before collapsing. What’s at’s more, where other ultra ultra-budget budget Chromebooks stuff in dated Celeron N3350 and N4000 processors, the IdeaPad 3 has a 2019vintage N4020 running at up to 2.8GHz. It’s still a dual-core, dualthread chip, which has an impact on its benchmark results, but we didn’t experience i e any painful pauses or slowdowns wns during testing with half a dozen or more Chrome tabs bs up and running. Somewhere ere between this and the Asus C223 3 there’s a perfect 11.6in budget Chromebook, with a great lightweight weight design, a decent screen een and solid specs. The e IdeaPad 3 gets close, but t it’s not quite there.