Lenovo Chromebook 3 11" Review - A $169 Intel Laptop! By Lon.TV

Hey everybody it's LAN Madman and if you're looking for a low-cost Chromebook, this one might be worth taking a look at this is the Lenovo IdeaPad 311. It is an 11 inch, Chromebook Intel powered pretty much basic transportation, but it is very reasonably priced, and I thought we would get one in and put it through its paces here and see what it's all about, and we're going to do that in just a second, but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure if this came in on loan from Lenovo. So we're done with this. It goes back to them all the opinions you're about to hear are my own. Nobody is paying for this review, nor is anyone reviewing or approving it before it gets uploaded. So, let's get into it now and see what this laptop is all about.

Now, it's a time I'm recording this video. This is being sold for one hundred and sixty-nine dollars at Walmart. That is super inexpensive for a name-brand, Chromebook and I'll have a link to this. In my video description, if you want to check that out, so let's dive in now to the hardware, this has an Intel n4, t20 processor. This is the lower-end Intel Gemini Lake series of chips.

It is finless, though, so it makes no noise, and it actually performs halfway decently. For its price point, this one has 4 gigabytes of RAM and the lowest cost version. Unfortunately only has 32 gigabytes of storage. Now normally on a Chromebook, you don't need all that much storage, because most of what it does is in the cloud, but now, with these things being able to run Android and Linux applications, you're, probably going to want one with a little more storage space I do believe there is a 64 gig version available for a little more money, but unfortunately the storage is not expandable, but it does have an SD card slot that we'll take a look at as we start making our way through the rest of the review here now. This is nothing fancy from a build quality standpoint.

It's all plastic, as you can see, the top case here really shows off fingerprints quite nicely. It's very smooth and kind of nice feeling actually for a low cost. Laptop you've got that same smoothness on the keyboard deck here, which again will definitely pick up fingerprint grease and everything else. The trackpad isn't bad it's about what you would expect from a machine that you're not paying a lot of money for, but it does get the job done and is nice and wide here nice keyboard of sighs keys, of course, well spaced, very nice efficient design. Here the display will go about down to this level.

It's not a two-in-one, of course, but it does have a little of leeway here for kids. That might be a little too overeager when they open things up. There's a webcam here, nothing spectacular! But if you want to do a web call or something you can get that done for school or whatever the nice thing is that the Intel chips on these actually do pretty well with video. So you shouldn't have too many issues popping in to Zoom calls and Google meets, and that sort of thing now. What really surprised me about this? Let me give you my overhead view: is the port selection on the laptop here, so you've got a USB type-c port here? This is where you plug the power supply into, but it is a full service port, so it also gets video out and works with any USB data devices that you plug in now.

It really surprised me about the USB-C port here is that it supports 4k video at 60 Hertz. That is not something that one would expect from a budget laptop, but you got it here. USB 3.0 port over here next to it, you've got a micro, SD card slot. I believe this will take up to a 128 gigabyte card and the card sits very flushed to the case. You can carry that card around with you all the time and augment its internal storage and I would expect over time that they're going to get more flexible about what you can do with that SD card slot, including using it with Linux and Android.

At the moment, it's a bit more limited, but you do have that there and I think that will be something we'll be seeing more of in the future. Next to that, you've got a headphone microphone jack for plugging in your headphones. It also has Bluetooth onboard of course, and then on the other side, we've got almost the same number of ports. We got another USB 3 port here and another USB-C port, and this one is also full service. So if you want to plug the power cable onto this side versus the other one, it will work fine.

There. Video output also works through this USB-C port. So it was great to see some real nice modern, USB, C functionality on this machine and then over here you've got a Kensington lock for locking it down on the desk. Underneath are the speakers as you would expect. These are not going to knock this knocks off or anything, but they're decent enough.

It is stereo, so you'll get some good stereo separation, but not a very good range of sound and the quality of the sound will vary. Based on what surface you have the laptop down on the display is very low resolution, as you would expect it is 1366 by 768. That is basically a 720p resolution, not the best quality display either it's a TN display, so it will lack that punch and sharpness that you might see out of an IPS display, but again at the price point, we're not going to split hairs over that, and given that this is an 11.6-inch laptop, it is very portable and very compact. It weighs about two and a half pounds or 1.12 kilograms, so it won't add all that much weight to your bag. These are great for kids.

This is the class of Chromebook that typically gets issued in a school. The battery life Lenovo says, is about 10 hours on this. I would agree with that statement. If you keep the display brightness down, maximum brightness is 215 it's, so it's never going to be terribly bright to begin with. But if you keep it around here, I think you can get the advertised battery life, provided you stick to web browsing and the basics.

Let's take a look now and see how this performs again: it's got an Intel processor on board and, as you'll see, it does pretty well with doing the basics all right. So, let's start off with some web browsing, we'll just go to the NASA. gov home page and see how quickly everything renders in and there you go. You can see things popped up quickly here. This does have an AC wireless radio.

So if you have modern Wi-Fi, it will take advantage of that and for basic web browsing. It does just fine here, no problems whatsoever. Now, a little earlier, I hooked the laptop up to a 4k display with a USB-C to display port adapter, and we were able to play back 4k 60 frames per second video from YouTube and when all the YouTube controls were invisible at full screen, we were able to get the video to playback without dropping any frames. But if you move the mouse and those controls come back up on screen, it will impact the performance a little. But by and large it was pretty cool to see that working again on a very low-cost device here, so I don't think.

You're going to have too many problems doing all of your basic web browsing and video watching on this device and on the browser bench org speedometer benchmark test. We got a score of eighty-five point: eight on version, 1.0 of that test and fifty-one point: nine on version 2.0 and, as you can see here, the n forty twenty processors is a little faster than the prior generation and for a thousand chip. We've seen on a few recent Chromebooks that we've gotten in here on the channel, so altogether I think we're looking at pretty decent performance out of this little laptop with that Intel finless processor. Now these Chromebooks now run Android apps as well, and I've got Mario Kart here running its running just fine, but of course this is a game designed for touchscreens and using the Mouse's, not an ideal scenario here, especially because I have to hold the mouse button down to get this game to work. Some Android apps that support game controllers will work here.

So there are some perfect gaming options that you have available to you, but not all of them, as you can see here, will be all that spectacular. Now you do get the Google Play Store. So if you've purchased a game or an app on your phone or tablet, it will also be accessible to you through your Google account on the Chromebook and if the app runs nicely on this platform, you'll have a good experience with it. This will work, of course, with games, but also things like the Android version of Microsoft Word and some other utilities that might be pretty useful and altogether the performance is about what I would expect out of a low-priced device. Now I do want to caution.

You, though, about some higher-end Android games. Those don't seem to work here, even though they'll install and say they're compatible. So a good example of that is Call of Duty mobile when I go to load it here, you can see, we've got the title screen we get to this part, and then it's going to just drop out on us and that's it. So just be aware of the fact that this is mostly a casual Android device and not something to play higher-end games on. But one thing that does work nicely on the Chromebook are Linux applications.

You can enable those by going into the lower right-hand corner of the screen here, going to System Preferences and then looking for Linux beta on the left, when you enable it is'll take a little of time to get everything installed, but once it is up and running with Linux you'll get a man prompt. You can then start installing packages. So I installed a bunch of apps here before I got started, including a few command lines. One's like NATO here, but I also enabled LibreOffice, which is a full-on office suite running in Linux. That will look and feel a lot like Microsoft Office will on here, and it's certainly a lot more of that field versus the Android version of Excel, for example, and what's nice about this- is that it's totally free and open-source? It runs locally on the Chromebook.

You don't have to pay anybody anything to use it or keep using it and all the files that you work with are stored locally, and it can open up Excel and Word documents and there's a whole suite of applications that come along with this another cool thing that works with this is steam, because this is a Linux based Chromebook you'll have access to steam and games that work in Linux. Now, there's a limit here on the hardware. We have a limited amount of RAM and processing power, but things like shuffle night here do actually run pretty nicely, because the GPU on the Intel processor now works with the Linux system. Here, it's not going to give you spectacular performance for Triple A game. It probably won't run GTA, 5 or anything like that, but things like shovel knight here actually do run pretty nicely.

Let's take a look and see how it runs right now, so here is shovel knight running at a steady, 60 frames per second, as you can see, it's very playable the sound works, and you can actually hear how loud the speaker's can get on this thing. One limitation on the Linux side right now is using the SD card slot and the external USB devices I'm sure they'll, add support for that down the road. So this is something we'll be continuing to come back to in the future as things develop, but all in really cool stuff to see things like shuffle knight here running, really nicely on a Chromebook in Linux. Now one thing that Chromebooks also do pretty well is game streaming, and we did a whole video on this topic. The other day when you can stream games from PCs in your home and in some cases remotely Google Stadia, also works pretty well on these low-end Chromebooks, so definitely check out that video to give yourself some guidance to what your options are out there and, as always with Chrome OS.

Things continue to improve over time, so we'll definitely be exploring that topic again in the future. But that's another thing you can do gaming wise on a Chromebook end of life of this one is under the new 8-year policy from Google. This was not yet up on the auto-update support page that Google has for a Chromebook lifespan, but given the new policy of 8 years, I would expect this one to be updated up until 2028. Now, if you're watching these 3 years in the future, it doesn't give you three years beyond 2028 it's when the platform was introduced. So 2028 is the end of life.

Support for this one, and I think you should be able to certainly get your money back using this over the course of eight years before those updates expire and overall, it's a nice machine. I think it's a great deal right now and if you're looking to get into Chrome, OS or experiment a little with Chromebooks or maybe just get something for your kid to use. This is a really solid, buy, especially from a name-brand manufacturer. Really, no reservations here recommending this one to folks who want some nice basic transportation, and it's really cool just to see how good basic transportation is. These days, that's going to do it for now until next time this is Lion Simon.

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Source : Lon.TV