Lenovo Flex 3 Chromebook Review: Good Price, Bad Screen

Lenovo’s iPad Flex 3 Chromebook is one of the best Chromebooks I’ve used. It is also one of the cheapest, retailing for $ 349.99.

Any laptop that costs so much has some serious drawbacks – and the Flex 3 certainly does. On the other hand, if you are the shopkeeper who is ready to separate those, then this little IdeaPad has many pleasant surprises up its sleeve. There are even some areas (specifically, battery life) where it runs significantly more expensive devices for their money.

I’ll start with a pleasant surprise. The Flex 3 offers a more modern port selection than expected at its price point – there are two USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 1 ports and two USB 3.1 Type-A Gen 1 ports (one on each side, which is really easy to charge stuff. And to connect), as well as a microSD reader, an audio combo jack, and a lock slot. If you are not in low light then there is a 720p webcam which works well. And the touchpad is surprisingly strong – I often find that touchpads have a plastic feel in this price range. Flex even comes with a Google Security H1 chip, which encrypts sensitive on-device data.

The Lenovo Ideapad Flex 3 Chromebook opens on a table in front of two houseplants.  The screen displays the upper windows of a large building.

There is a power button on the side, as well as a volume rocker.

There are two features that really impress me (apart from battery life, which I will discuss later). First of all, I can’t stop talking about the keyboard. It’s great, with a ton of travel and a satisfying click. The keys have a slightly rough texture that really grew on me. I got one of the highest scores on my typing test with almost no errors. The only note is that it lacks backlighting, a feature you’ll find on more expensive devices like Acer’s Chromebook Spin 713 (our current top Chromebook pick) and Lenovo’s Flex 5 Chromebook.

Lenovo Ideapad Flex 3 keyboard seen from above.

God, I love a good keyboard.

Second, audio. The balance and volume these 2W stereo speakers give is comparable to any more expensive Chromebook. They easily beat the Spin 713, which seems thinner and thinner. There are of course very little bass, the percussion is very weak, I’ve heard a little distortion at maximum volume, and you want an external speaker for any congestion setting. But Flex is great for video conferencing and regular music-listening, and certainly beats I’ve heard from all kinds of Windows laptops that are over $ 1,000.

Now, for the major shortcomings. First, this thing is a trick. It is not very heavy, at 2.65 pounds, but it is 0.7 inches thick, and it is not far from the size of many modern 13-inch laptops despite having just an 11-inch screen. My main turnoff, however, is the bezels. Good masters, bezels are huge. When I am using Flex 3, I feel like I see a small window of the screen floating in a black abyss. It looks like a device that you bought in 2014.

The Lenovo Ideapad Flex 3 Chromebook is open from the right side.

I wish Lenovo would have sprung up for a better screen.

The Lenovo Ideapad Flex 3 Chromebook is half open on a table in front of two houseplants, from the left.

Use Flex 3 in laptop tent, stand or tablet mode.

Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chromebook is off to the right.

Here he is from the other side.

I like some things about the chassis, though. It does not feel at all fluffy, with an aluminum cover and a non-plastic finish. The display and keyboard are flex-free (despite the laptop’s name). And the 360 ​​hinge is strong, with very little stuttering.

Performance point, though: This is the second major drawback here. It’s tight – I often use two windows, as well as I’m squatting on short text to do that work on flex. There is also brightness inside the house, and a fairly low resolution (1366 x 768). I’m gonna be real: it’s pixel-y to see. I have been using the Flex 3 as my primary driver for a week, and will miss the keyboard and audio when I send it back, I can never wait to see this awesome screen again.

It’s low on the chassis – let’s look inside. This Ideapad Flex 3 Chromebook configuration is powered by Intel’s dual-core Celeron N4020. It is at the bottom of the barrel as an Intel processor, and comes with just 4GB of memory (LPDDR4-2400, soldered) and 64GB of eMMC 5.1 storage.

On a Windows machine, these specs would be a tough pass. But Chrome OS is a light load, and I can vouch that the Flex 3’s screen multitasking has a larger range than its horsepower. I was Suitable Jumping between dozens of Chrome tabs and a few applications, to use the laptop for a substantial workload, but the experience was enough that I wouldn’t recommend it.

The Lenovo Ideapad Flex 3 Chromebook is open, viewed from the back, on a table in front of two angles, angled slightly to the right.

The color is called “almond”.

When I tried to work on top of Spotify or YouTube streams, the scrolling became a bit sluggish, and the transition between laptop and tablet mode was a bit slower than I would have liked. The only task where I ran into the real problem, however, was sorting through a batch of shots in Google Photos (along with some other apps that run). The Flex 3 got the job done, but it was quite slow. The zoom meeting I tried (at the top of some other tabs that I needed) was also a bad experience – the audio randomly cut a couple of times, and the video was full-length.

Overall, this tool is best if you want to do basic office or school tasks, and you don’t think you’ll need to open a few things at a time. (And if it doesn’t go without saying, you might want to stay far away from this thing if you plan to do anything with Linux.)

The flipside of a weak processor is that the Flex 3 has excellent battery life. I charged eight hours and 45 minutes with an average of 50 percent brightness – and I was insisting that would be scarcely more than most people. You can expect this thing to last a full day, and certainly more than many more powerful Chromebooks. The 45W charger is admittedly quick to juice the device up to 60 minutes in 52 minutes.

The Lenovo Idea Flex 3 Chromebook is laid flat on a wooden table, viewed from above, angled slightly to the left.

Six rows of keys.

Flex 3 runs Chrome OS, meaning it can natively run Android apps. Some of these have been improved since the last time I used this operating system – Messenger is now functional and not a complete disaster making the machine a brick, for example. But most services that I use daily (Slack, Twitter, Gmail, Reddit, etc.) are just better experiences in one browser, so I haven’t used the dedicated app functionality to all of them. There is still a double-notification problem – every time I received a Slack message, I received a notification from both the Slack Android app and my browser.

Flex 3 also supports the tablet mode of Chrome OS, which has gone quite well. It supports Android-esche gesture controls, which should help flatten the learning curve for new Chromebook users (although they were a bit sluggish on this device).

The Lenovo Ideapad Flex 3 is seen from the left, in tent mode, with two houseplants in the background.

The Flex 3 feels very strong in tent mode.

The Lenovo iPad Flex 3 sits in a Chromebook in tented mode, with the screen in front of the camera, slightly angled to the left, a table with two houseplants in the background.  The screen displays a grid of Chrome OS app icons.

It took a hot second to switch to tablet mode, but it got there.

Deciding whether to buy a $ 350 Chromebook is less important to understand what the major drawbacks are. In this case, there are two: the screen is tight, and the processor is weak. So the question to ask is: can you get those goods?

If you are using this tool to pay bills, email people and play some YouTube videos, then I would say that you can. It will be a bit tight, but you can. And if you can fill up, the Flex 3 offers some great benefits in other areas, from an excellent keyboard and convenient port to excellent battery life and respectable audio. In these categories, it competes or surpasses our top Chromebook pick (Spin 713). If you’re okay with its flaws, you’ll find that the Flex 3 offers plenty for its budget price.

Photography by Monica Chin / The Reporter Door

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