Lenovo

I'm usually not keen on either ARM-powered Chromebooks or dual Chromebooks/tablets. But, the latestLenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 has me reconsidering.

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This hybrid laptop is a 2-in-1 Chromebook and tablet. The lightweight 13.3-inch tablet/display is completely detachable. 

Its screen is one of the things I love about this combo. It's an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) Samsung Display, which provides incredible colors, darks, and contrast. I am not a fan of watching videos on screens. That's why I paid serious money for an LG OLED77C1 4K TV . I mean, why would I watch something on a small display when I have a 77-inch TV? But, for the first time, I have a portable screen I'll be happy to watch the next episode of Star Trek Discovery on.

Technically, it has a default resolution of 1920x1080. This is backed up by a Qualcomm Adreno GPU. You can also adjust it to cut down on blue light if you're worried about staying up nights watching a TV show on the display when you should be sleeping.  

This is all powered up by an 8-core, 2.55 GHz Qualcomm ARM Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processor. Inside this, you'll find two fast Kryo 495 Gold cores based on the ARM Cortex-A76 architecture and six small power-efficient Kryo 495 Silver cores built on the ARM Cortex-A55 design. This isn't fast enough to make this laptop much of a gaming machine, but it's more than quick enough for watching 4K videos. 

For storage, the Duet 5 uses 128GBs of eMMC Flash Memory. That's more than big enough for a Chromebook. It also has 8GBs of RAM. 

When it comes to talking with the rest of the world, it comes with Bluetooth and 802.11ax, better known to me and you as Wi-Fi 6.

Its one lack is that it only comes with a pair of USB-C ports. That's it. The end. 

I benchmarked the machine using Principled Technologies' Chromebook-specific, second-generation CrXRPT benchmark using the latest Chrome OS. Principled Technologies, a descendant of Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operations, is one of the best private benchmarking and testing companies on the planet. 

This test tells you how fast a Chromebook handles things you do every day. This includes doing work and more fun activities such as playing video games, watching movies, and editing pictures.

Buy the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 here

$499 at Best Buy

The performance test gives you an overall score. With this benchmark, the higher the score, the better. In this case, it scored a decent 61. For ARM-powered Chromebooks, this is a good number. Its battery life came to a healthy 12+ hours. 

Altogether, theIdeaPad Duet 5 retails for$499 . As far as I'm concerned, that's a great price for a great machine. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've installed Linux on it, which is now fully supported on Chromebooks, and I'm going to work on getting that set up properly.

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