Lenovo's Popular Duet Chromebook Gets a Big Update
Laptops
Speaker 1: The Lenovo duet is back and it's brought a windows 11 friend.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with the duet, it started as a single product, the 10 inch Lenovo idea, pad duet Chromebook. And that proved to be a hit because it was cheap, small, and it worked well enough and came with a keyboard cover in the box. But mostly because it was cheap. So here we have the updated version for [00:00:30] 2022, the idea pad duet, three Chromebook, and it's filled with improvements. It's now an 11 inch tablet with a two K resolution display. The K sluggish media tech processor has been replaced with the Qualcomm snap seven C gen two compute platform, which should perk up the performance sum. And the one immediate downside to me is that it's wifi five instead of wifi six. Now, uh, that's not a deal breaker, [00:01:00] but still anyway, Lenovo has addressed two of my biggest gripes about the first gen model, one of those, and it might seem small, but one of them was that it only had one USBC port that made charging and using the port for anything else, a little trickier.
Speaker 1: Now the new duet has a USBC port on both sides, so you can charge and connect a monitor or storage, or it just makes it easier to charge. In general. The [00:01:30] second issue was the keyboard, which was cramped and had some half size keys. It just wasn't good for touch typing and it was uncomfortable. The larger size of the new version in of the tablet gave Lenovo a little extra room for the keys and touch pad and travel is also a tiny bit better. At 1.4 millimeters. The keyboard is also better when you are not using it. Uh, you no longer need to detach the keyboard for tablet mode, but you can now flip [00:02:00] it around behind the display and it will be ally attached. So it's not flopping all over the place. And it also locks the keyboard, keys and touch pad. While you use it as a tablet, of course, these improvements mean the duet three is not going to be as cheap at launch as it's predecessor, it's expected to start around $400 when it's available in may.
Speaker 1: Lenovo has also expanded the duet line beyond Chromebooks and will now be its name for [00:02:30] two and ones with detachable keyboards, including the new idea, pad duet five. I coming in July, it'll start at $750 and it's a 12 inch windows, 11 tablet with a detachable keyboard portfolio. And there will also be an optional backlit keyboard if you want. Uh, it'll be available with up to a core I seven processor, but the base model is a basic Pentium chip, fully loaded. It sounds like it might be a good alternative [00:03:00] to a surface pro, but it looks like we'll have to wait till summer to find out.
