Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook review By Engadget

Chromebooks may have started out as inexpensive cheaply made laptops, but as they got more popular manufacturers started, making them more powerful with better design to match. Naturally, this sent prices up, and recently it's been hard to find a basic Chromebook to recommend that cost less than five hundred dollars enter Lenovo the company's flex, five Chromebook, which I will hereafter refer to just as the Flex five, isn't anything special on the surface, but digging a little deeper revealed, what's probably the best Chromebook for most people and at four hundred and nine dollars on Amazon. It represents a tremendous value for an everyday laptop. As with so many Lenovo products. The flux 5 is an unassuming and understated laptop closed-up. It looks just like a basic gray slab, not too thin at 2/3 of an inch or too light at just under three pounds.

It's your basic 13-inch laptop and that vibe is the same when you open it up. The aforementioned 13.3 inch touchscreen has decently small bezels on three of four sides with a thick strip at the bottom and a webcam completely the physical slider to block it up top. The screen itself is pretty excellent for computer in this price range. It doesn't have the best viewing angles and reflections and bright light can be pretty harsh, but it's still relatively bright. Colors and contrasts make everything pop and the 1080p resolution is solid.

On display this size, the flux 5 has a 360 degree hinge so that the screen can be flipped all the way around to use the device as a rather heavy tablet, as such you'll find a volume, rocker and power button on the side, so you can adjust things without the keyboard. The sides also contain two USB-C ports, one on each side, a USB, a port, a headphone jack, a security lock in a micros card slot, nothing too exciting, but a standard USB port is always a good thing. These days, Lenovo has built a reputation for excellent keyboards and the company didn't. Let me down on the Flex 5, the backlit keys are nice and large with plenty of travel. You won't compromise the typing experience with this device, most of the Chromebooks I review that they have had excellent keyboards, but none of them has been as inexpensive as the Flex 5 put simply I can type on this computer all day long and not miss a beat.

The trackpad is also big enough to be comfortable and no trouble recognized. Various clicks and swipes I found a lot of Chromebook manufacturers build trackpads that are oddly short and wide, but this sounds just a bit more vertical space, which makes a big difference to me. Laptop speakers have gotten surprisingly good lately, but Lenovo isn't pushing anything forward here. That's okay! As most of the time I don't expect high quality listening from laptop speakers, it's more about playing back at YouTube, video or hearing notifications, and these speakers are fine for that music playback was rather tinny, though you can crank the volume up pretty high. If you want to the fact that there's no speaker on the bottom or sides means that audio playback is pretty muffled when you flip the screen around as well, I was pleasantly surprised with the Flex 5, once I was logged in and putting it through.

My normal routine Lenovo seems to have hit a sweet spot of specs and price here. Making a chrome app has nearly the same performance as more expensive models, while keeping an affordable price. The combo of Intel's, tenth generation, Core, i3, processor, four gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes of storage is pretty modest, but it handled my work needs with no issues. Generally I run a few Chrome windows with anywhere from 5 to 15 tabs as well as dedicated web apps for slack YouTube, music or Spotify, keep Trello tourist, hangouts and tweet deck I also run the occasional Android app like Facebook, Messenger or Adobe. Lightroom I was worried that the four gigabytes of RAM wouldn't cut it, but I didn't run into skips on my music from low memory.

Occasionally, tabs would refresh if I had look at them recently, but the overall experience was consistently smooth and trouble-free. As I mentioned earlier, the flux 5 has a 360 degree hinge, so you can flip the screen around for tablet mode. If that's something you're interested in the flux, 5s hinge is strong and flips around nicely, with no sticking points or friction. Well, no bows lots of experience making two and one device's like this, so I have a few long-term, build quality concerns here. Either.

There's not a lot else to say about how the flux 5 works, but that's a good thing. It feels like any high-end Chromebook I've used in the last year, but without the high price tags that accompany many of the best options out there put simply the price to performance ratio here is excellent, not just for a Chromebook but for any laptop. The flux 5 succeeds in another area of battery life. It's not the best I've ever seen, but the laptop did last just over 8 hours in our 10 looping, an HD movie with the screen set to 65% brightness I got similar results going about my normal day as well, so I think it's safe to say you can expect about 8 hours unless you're spending the entire day on Google, mate or Zoom calls come to think of it. You might be doing that these days, so just find an outlet if you're going to be out of video calls all day again give them the flex.5S relatively low price I have no issues with the battery it out last multiple Chromebooks that cost significantly more. It's been about three years since I've reviewed a Chromebook that I can recommend as easily as Lenovo's flex.

Five, it's really quite simple for four hundred nine dollars, you get a Chromebook that works just as well as ones that cost hundreds of dollars more. You do compromise a bit on storage and RAM, so power users should look elsewhere, but for anyone else, the flux 5 is exactly the kind of Chromebook. We should be seeing more of it's a great everyday computer that can handle most modern web-based tasks. Photoshop, aficionados and video editors will continue to look elsewhere, but if you're looking for a computer, that's easy to use and simple to maintain the flux.5 is a great option.

Source : Engadget