The 2020 Lenovo Chromebook Duet impressed us with its surprisingly low price, great screen, and impressive battery life. It was one of the first Chrome tablets to hit the market, and with the included type cover, it also makes a pretty usable Chrome-powered laptop. [The Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5 is an upgraded version with a larger, better OLED screen and a correspondingly higher price.
While not the first OLED-equipped Chromebook on the market, the Duet 5 will likely be the first Chrome tablet with an OLED display. According to Lenovo, it should still offer best-in-class battery life. But is it worth the price? Here is what we know so far about the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5.
Lenovo announced the Chromebook Duet 5 this week as part of its annual Lenovo Tech World showcase. It is scheduled for release in October 2021, with prices starting at $429. This is roughly $150 more than the $279 starting price of the original Lenovo Chromebook Duet, which did not feature an OLED, but is currently available for about $50-$100 less.
It should be available from Lenovo's website, but may also be found at some third-party retailers. Outside of North America, it will be sold under a slightly different name, the IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook, due to the way Lenovo brands its products in different regions.
At first glance, the Chromebook Duet 5 looks a lot like the original Duet, only bigger: there is a core tablet with a 13.3-inch OLED display, a removable keyboard, and a cloth back cover with a built-in kickstand. The back cover also has a shallow indentation with a magnetic charging pad, where the Chromebook Duet 5's stylus can be tucked away when not in use.
In our initial review of the Duet, we found the removable cloth cover's built-in kickstand to be a bit weak, but usable as long as you are careful with it. The keyboard is similar, requiring some getting used to and slippery if you're not careful, but it's adequate for working on the go.
Size-wise, the base Chromebook Duet 5 tablet is 0.29 inches thin and weighs just 1.5 pounds, which seems to be about as thin and light as the 2020 iPad Air. It will come in two colors: storm gray and the more eye-catching Abyss Blue.
A big selling point of this new Chromebook Duet 5 is its 13.3-inch full HD OLED display. That's because OLED displays are still rare on laptops, especially Chromebooks. For example, the 4K AMOLED display on Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook made watching movies and playing light games on a Chromebook a pleasure.
Lenovo claims that the OLED display on the Chromebook Duet 5 can achieve 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and brightness levels of up to 400 nits.
Don't expect many options for connecting accessories to the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5. As for ports, there is one USB-C 3.0 port, which is enough to connect an external mouse and keyboard if you really want to boost productivity.
There is also a pogo-pin connector on the bottom edge of the tablet to plug in the included keyboard cover when transitioning from tablet mode. There does not appear to be a headphone jack at this time, so if you want to jam out or have privacy during a video call, you may have to use Bluetooth headphones.
Chromebooks are not known for having powerful components, as Chrome OS has a limited operating range and does not require much to work well. The original Lenovo Chromebook Duet featured 4GB of RAM and a Mediatek Helio P60T 2.0GHz octa-core CPU, enough to handle most light web browsing and run some games at moderate speeds.
The new Chromebook Duet 5 seems to pack a bit more power, as it ships with a Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processor and up to 8GB of RAM. As for storage, it will come with an eMMC SSD with a capacity of up to 256GB.
One of the big selling points of the original Chromebook Duet was its amazing battery life; Lenovo advertised it would last up to 10 hours on a single charge, but in our lab tests it actually lasted 12 hours and 47 minutes, beating most tablets and Chromebooks outperformed most tablets and Chromebooks.
Lenovo's new Chromebook Duet 5 claims that its 42 WHr battery can last up to 15 hours on a single charge, so it appears to last the same or longer. Of course, we won't know if it will last this long (or longer) in a real-world environment until we get one and test it.
We were very surprised by the performance of the original Chromebook Duet, and Lenovo was no different. The company released its innovative Chromebook 2-in-1 just as COVID-19 was taking off and parents were starting to buy inexpensive Chromebooks so their children could attend school remotely.
And now the company seems ready to capitalize on the continued demand for lightweight, premium Chromebooks with the Duet 5. We can't wait to see how the addition of an OLED display will change the experience of using a Chrome tablet. We can't wait to see how the addition of an OLED display will change the experience of using a Chrome tablet.
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