Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Chromebook 14inch FHD Laptop (MediaTek MT8183, 4 GB RAM, 64GB eMMC, ARM Mali-G72 MP3 Graphics, Chrome OS) – Abyss Blue

Product Information

A propensity to wander also means that Chromebooks need solid Wi-Fi, since they may be far from a wireless base station. While I didn’t experience any random disconnects or slowdowns while testing the IdeaPad 3 connected to a Netgear Nighthawk router, it is unfortunate that the laptop uses the older 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard. This offers adequate speed and reliability today, but the next-generation 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) standard provides better future-proofing. How about Photoshop? It will run OK for the basics, but 4GB RAM is not enough if you want to start working on big layered images. Photoshop is a RAM hog, and when it runs out you will start to see significant slow-down and potentially some crashes. Build quality is fair, if no better than the norm. The keyboard surround will flex a little under the pressure of hard typing, if not enough to ruin the experience, and the inside of the IdeaPad 3 looks a little too much of a mish-mash. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3’s matte finish means it can actually be used outdoors on a sunny day reasonably comfortably. Watching a cached Netflix movie won’t be much fun, but text editing look OK, thanks to the very high contrast involved. Yes, it’ll look dim, but you can make the text out. The bodywork is mostly plastic, although the lid is an unnamed metal, finished in the two-tone grey Lenovo seems to favour for its Chromebook line these days. There’s no doubt that the Slim 3i 14 is a budget Chromebook but it doesn’t feel horribly cheap and the construction seems perfectly robust. In fact, Lenovo claims it’s certified for military-grade durability, along with resistance to damage from spills and drops. It hasn’t been tested against the full range of tests required for MIL-STD-810H certification, however.

So, is the IdeaPad 3 Chromebook 11 the Chrome OS bargain of the century or a cut-price duffer we should warn you of? Inevitably, the truth lies somewhere in-between. This might be a super-cheap Chromebook, but you don’t have to spend a whole lot more to find some competition. You don’t get a graphics card, just the integrated graphics that is part of the Core i3 processor. There was little point in subjecting the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 to our usual gaming tests, but I did try out Skyrim to see if it would run.There are just a few other points to mention. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3’s speakers are, you may gave guessed, pretty poor. They have the thin, bass-free sound typical of your average budget laptop. The scores in the Android Geekbench 5 benchmark are a little higher than the Celeron N4000-based Chromebooks, too, though not up there with the faster Pentium and Core i3 models. All told, the IdeaPad 3 feels a little snappier than some of its rivals in day-to-day browsing and general use. Sound is another area where the IdeaPad Slim 3i does surprisingly well. You’re not going to get the richest tone or immersive surround sound here, but it isn’t horrible weedy, harsh or tinny, and you can watch old concert footage on YouTube or stream a show on Netflix without feeling like you have to plug some headphones in. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3’s fake metal plates aren’t really a reason to be put off this laptop but its screen might be. It runs Windows 10 S, which means you’re restricted to Windows Store apps unless you switch it to full Windows 10. You can do this for free in a matter of seconds, although will see some performance compromises.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 has an Intel Core-series processor, one more powerful than the typical Windows 10 S laptop. So why is Windows 10 S even here? The laptop has limited RAM and storage, and the restricted software is a heads-up of who it’s meant for. In terms of the physical design, Lenovo has made the best of a limited budget. The all-plastic construction feels cheap, but there’s a nice two-tone textured effect on the lid, which itself isn’t as weak and flexible as on some budget Chromebooks. Bar the massive bezel below the screen, it’s not a bad-looking device.You don’t necessarily need to upgrade, however. Over a day or so of light use, including web browsing with a handful of tabs open at once, I found the IdeaPad 3 to be mostly free of sluggishness. It also took only around 10 seconds to boot up. I did encounter a significant slowdown when I was transferring a multi-gigabyte file from an external drive, but the system never froze up completely.