Lenovo Duet 5 adds OLED to our fave budget Chromebook

Speaker 1: Just in time for both back to school and kind of the beginning of the holiday shopping season, Lenovo has frankly, a pretty cool looking detachable Chromebook. It's the idea pad duet five Chromebook. And it is a sequel of sorts to one of our favorite Chromebooks and favorite budget laptops. For the last couple of years, Speaker 1: The original duet was a 10 inch Chromos tablet that had a clip on keyboard, and you could get it for under [00:00:30] $300 that was especially valuable over the past year and a half when everybody needed their own machine to do remote school and remote work. So some families may end up buying a lot of due different computers for people, but that original version was not perfect for everybody, especially because tenant screen is pretty small and frankly, the keyboard was kind of prem because it's made to match that tendon screen. So not great for long form typing or using, you know, all day every day, this new version, the idea of had due at five improves on a lot of those things [00:01:00] still keeps the price pretty, uh, more in the $500 range than the $300 range. But for that, you get a larger 13.3 in screen VHD screen, and here's the crazy thing. Speaker 1: It's an Oland screen. Uh, we don't see a lot of Ole screens in laptops in general. Uh, on top of that, Lenovo says, this is the first detachable Chromebook with an Oland screen. Uh, I have no trouble believing that, frankly, I can't think of another Chromebook off the top of my head with an a lid screen, but maybe there's one or two of them out there [00:01:30] it's powered by the same Qualcom snap dragon seven C gen two as the original version, uh, which means it's not a super powerful system, but it's really optimized for battery life. Uh, when you have one of those mobile phones, style chips in there, you can usually run it for a lot longer without, uh, recharging. And that's important if you're gonna carry this around and use it in its tablet mode, you know, not plugged in the tablet part itself. Speaker 1: It's only about 1.4 pounds. Of course, then you have to add the cover that comes on the bank and you can store stylist in it and [00:02:00] then the clip on keyboard. But again, credit to Lenovo here, the keyboard and that back cover are both included with the system. A lot of other brands, you have to buy that stuff separately, and that really drives up price. And because that OS screen is so great for watching movies and streaming videos, it's also got quad speakers built in. Hopefully the sound is a little bit better and my brief hands on with it, I didn't really get a chance to it, crank it up. Uh, but a bigger body usually means more room for bigger speakers because zoom meetings and other types [00:02:30] of web camming are so important these days. Uh, it's got two cameras, a five megapixel camera on the front, an eight megapixel camera on the back. Speaker 1: If it was up to me, I would switch those people, obviously use the front facing camera a lot more these days, but it's a bigger device. So there really isn't room for it on the front face. Lenovo says you can get up to eight gigabytes of Ram up to 2 56 gig SSD storage inside that says to me that the base model is gonna have less than that. Uh, but it, maybe we're trading up to that. Uh, you don't really need storage space [00:03:00] on a Chromebook that much, but more Ram, always helpful, especially over the past year and a half good budget. Laptops have been hard to find they've been in short supply, frankly, as soon as some come in stock, they generally sell out right away because everybody needs again, laptops for doing remote schooling for doing work from home stuff. And you can't really share a, a computer like you used to have maybe a, a laptop. Speaker 1: All the kids would share and you can't do that anymore. Everyone needs their own. And that's why I really like good solid budget laptops. Like this Chrome is great for students because most schools [00:03:30] that I've checked out, they use things like Google classroom that are, that are Google based, uh, cloud based, uh, perfect for ChromeOS systems. Uh, so this takes that original duet, which again, we liked, but was a very small device that you would not perhaps feel comfortable using for more than, you know, an hour or two at a time and turns it into something that's frankly, MacBook air size, 13 inch green, full size keyboard, and keeps the price way down. Uh, if you're gonna buy something that's around $500, I always say to a Chromebook, [00:04:00] cuz you're gonna get something that feels much snappier than a $500 windows laptop, which will really feel more like a budget laptop. I'm looking forward to checking out the idea, pan duet five Chromebook in more detail when it's, uh, available. I'm especially looking forward to checking out that ed screen.