In order to make 5G more practical for more people, maybe we should try putting it in a laptop.
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Well, that's exactly what happened with the Lenovo flex five G is one of the handful of 5G laptops that we've heard about since the beginning of this year, but it's the first one you can actually go out and buy offered by Verizon.
Of course, is providing the 5G service, and Lenovo can get [UNKNOWN] company.
Now the Flex line from Lenovo has always been one of my stealth favorites.
It's not as fancy as the Yoga line, but it has a display that folds all the way back, just like the Yoga does.
360 degree hinge.
So you have a Windows hybrid, or a two-in-one, where you can use it as a laptop in the clamshell mode If you can fold it back use it as a tablet, or you can do what I like to do which is fold the screen halfway back and have this kind of a kiosk display.
If you're watching video we're doing something like that.
This version of the Flex 5G is pretty fancy looking comparatively speaking, it's also a little on the expensive side.
It's $1499 because you know anything with 5G is going to have a premium price.
Despite the fact that you don't really get a ton of RAM or a ton of hard drive space.
You're really paying for that 5g antenna, the ability to say, hey, I'm the first guy in the block or the apartment building or the remote Office group to have 5g built into my laptop.
Now, why would you want that because it's a heck of a lot easier than tethering for From your phone, which is what most of us do, but can be unreliable at times and really, you don't get great throughput speed from tethering from your phone to your laptop.
But the Lenovo flex 5G well that's taken the built in LTE which maybe your company will pay for if you're getting this for work and adding 5G which again, you can get it In New York and Chicago and a bunch of other cities, you can dive down really deep on Brian's map and literacy coverage block by block.
The first thing I did was take a look at for Ryan's local map here in New York.
And I actually found I was right in At the middle of one of the zones that has 5G service, supposedly so went outside to one of the local coffee shops in my neighborhood that is set up some outdoor seating, so I can get back to at least some semblance of going out to a coffee shop with my laptop and working And I tried all these devices there did some speed tests.
I found I could walk around my neighborhood and find where the service had hotspots and dead spots very easily by folding the flex around which tablet mode and running those speed tests.
So I did not get the gigabit level service that they.
Talk about coming for everybody with 5G.
I usually got around 200 megabits per second, maybe a little bit less.
I topped out at 210 right in the middle of what Verizon says is a good service.
His own and that's compared to my regular home Wi Fi.
Read maybe got about 140 or so at best, and even my phone, which got about 30 to 45 depending on where I was standing again when I ran the test.
So the Lenovo with the fine t antenna built in what actually did really well and In terms of providing throughput, it's not exactly at the level that people are claiming that we're all going to have from our 5G at home with 5G network devices someday, but it's certainly a lot faster than any other option I had sitting out there at that little coffee shop.
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Now one of the reasons why this particular laptop is being paired with a 5G antenna is because it's kind of a smartphone at heart already.
This is one of a handful of laptops that has a Qualcomm chip side, rather than an Intel, or occasionally an AMD chip.
Now we've seen that in a few laptops that are trying to maximize battery life, trying to maximize And so, mobile data efficiency trying to come in at a reasonable cost.
But they don't often work as well in some of the programs that you use.
There could be some compatibility issues because this is an arm chip versus an x86 chip.
It's interesting because a handful of laptops that we've seen running Windows with these Qualcomm chips, they haven't Really been that impressive, but now Apple is going in the same direction, what they call Apple silicon, which is gonna replace Intel chips in Macs and Mac books next year.
Well, that's Apple's version of the same thing except for that company is at least purportedly going for high performance by really optimizing the hardware the operating system, the chip that Apple is now designing, I'm working very closely with the software that's most likely to need to get good performance out of it things like Photoshop and creative programs like that.
So in the apple version of an arm based computer, they're going for high performance and I don't know how that's really going to affect battery life or going to affect the ability to have mobile broadband.
Not that Mac's have that now, but That maybe someday, whereas on the windows side, it's usually more about battery life and mobile broadband performance.
Now that I've got the Lenovo flex 5G out of the box, set up to run a bunch of speed test, uses built in broadband outside, inside all over the place.
I'm gonna settle down and start doing some benchmark testing.
Add some battery life testing so far I have found the battery life to be pretty good.
I've really carried this around all day, searching for Wi Fi hotspots in and around my neighborhood and hanging out at coffee shops and other outdoor cafes and restaurants.
So stay tuned and we'll give you a big update with the battery life and the benchmarks and really how it all adds up besides just be a 5D laptop, which is a great feature to have, but it can't really be the only one.
That is our very first peek at the Lenovo flex 5G, first 5G laptop you go out and buy.
