Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome review: A convertible buddy for a steal

Laptopy s operačním systémem systémem Chrome OS od Googlu, jinak zvané Chromebooky, se suverénně největší popularitě těší v Severní Americe, kde se by se jich měla prodat až nadpoloviční většina. V porovnání s tím na našem trhu vesměs paběrkují a oficiálně je sem dováží pouze pár výrobců. Mezi ty patří také Lenovo a právě na jednoho zástupce z jeho řad se podíváme v této recenzi. Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome sice nepatří mezi horké novinky, zato jej ale seženete nové za velmi sympatickou cenu. Navíc ani výbavou nijak neurazí. Jak se mi tedy v praxi používalo?

Convertible „flipper“

It was Lenovo that came up with the innovative Yoga ultrabooks and thus played a major role in popularizing convertible laptops with a flip-around display of (almost) 360°. This type of design was subsequently adopted by many competitors, and over time, a feature once reserved for premium machines made its way into inexpensive notebooks. The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome, which relies on this design, is proof of this. In contrast, the materials used fully correspond to the given class – the body is completely plastic, and the manufacturer does not even mention what kind of cover glass was used on the display.

However, as for the chassis itself, it feels sufficiently robust and well-made, so I wouldn’t worry about it even with frequent travel. The chassis doesn’t creak, doesn’t flex significantly, and is surprisingly rigid in torsion for such an inexpensive device. The hinges are just stiff enough, so the display stays in position even when you carry the laptop from place to place in an open state, and with a little practice, it can be opened with just one hand. A small protrusion on the top edge of the lid, typical for this manufacturer’s laptops in recent years, helps with this.

The cheap impression of hard silver plastic is enhanced by a ribbed texture on one third of the lid surface. The smooth part of the plastic is, of course, more prone to fingerprints and theoretically also to scratches. With a thickness of 18.4 mm, the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome is not a particularly thin laptop, but at least the manufacturer utilized the space and equipped it with enough connectors – more on that in a moment. The remaining dimensions are 284 x 210 mm, and the weight settled at 1.25 kg, which is slightly higher than average for similarly sized laptops.

Decent picture and sound

One of the pleasant surprises for me was – considering the price – a quite solid IPS panel. It has a diagonal of 12.2″ and a resolution of 1920 x 1200 px, which also results in a 16:10 aspect ratio providing the user with a bit more vertical space. Personally, I often have a bit of a problem with this on 16:9 laptops, so I welcome every extra pixel vertically. However, if you will primarily use the laptop for watching movies, series, and other videos, you will only get slightly wider black bars above and below the video itself. It probably won’t surprise anyone that this is a 60Hz panel – higher refresh rates haven’t really hit laptops yet (except perhaps gaming ones), and this is doubly true for inexpensive Chromebooks.

The maximum brightness of 300 nits can be considered slightly above average, as there are still many laptops on the market with a brightness of only 220 or 250 nits. In practice, you can’t really expect to work outdoors with the Chromebook without problems – the glossy cover glass doesn’t help with this either – but for indoor use or when suitably shielded from the sun, you won’t have a problem. The viewing angles are very good, only the contrast and colors could be a bit more vibrant.

For a long time now, I’ve observed an interesting paradox where often even relatively inexpensive tablets can offer better sound reproduction than significantly more expensive laptops. Yet, from a purely technical standpoint, manufacturers usually have much more space in a laptop body to install larger speakers and position them correctly. Fortunately, this is not entirely the case with the tested Chromebook. The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome offers a pair of speakers located under a grille between the keyboard and the display lid. In the standard „laptop“ mode, the speakers are directed towards the user and offer more than sufficiently loud and relatively detailed sound. The bass is less pronounced, but it is present, and the tinny effect typical of smaller speakers is practically absent.

The keyboard is just „OK“

Of course, I must also mention the keyboard. Don’t expect any miracles here; after all, we have an ultra-cheap IdeaPad, not a work ThinkPad. I appreciate that the manufacturer tried to maximize the area the keyboard occupies. It is thus stretched across the entire width of the base, and the keys are not flattened even vertically. Unfortunately, it is a typical, inexpensive, chiclet (island-style) keyboard with a completely flat surface. Its mechanism is not particularly convincing either; the tactile feedback is relatively decent, but the lateral stability of the keys could certainly be better. When typing, the „just right“ spacing between the keys helped me at least. Among the positives, I must also include the uniform keyboard backlighting adjustable in three steps.

The key layout is typical for Chromebooks. For example, you won’t find a standard CapsLock key here but a so-called launcher, which functions similarly to the Win key on Windows computers. However, if you don’t want to give up CapsLock, you can assign this function to the key in the settings. Similarly, there is no Delete key, but you can choose a keyboard shortcut for its function. Last but not least, you won’t find F1 – F12 keys here either; instead, there are dedicated keys for controlling Chromebook functions by default. For myself, I can say that you can get used to everything mentioned; it just took time, and now I switch between Chromebook and Windows keyboards quite smoothly and without major problems.

Bad touchpad

It was worse with the touchpad, though. The fact that it’s a completely ordinary clickpad (touchpad with integrated button) with a plastic surface wouldn’t bother me that much here. The fact that I had trouble performing multi-touch gestures due to the plastic surface, on which my finger didn’t slide ideally, was worse. The worse precision of the touchpad complicated my life even more. However, I would still be willing to tolerate all of this on an inexpensive Chromebook with both eyes closed. What absolutely annoyed me the most was the gap between the touchpad’s touch surface and the button itself. Even with a light touch, I felt the touchpad surface sink down by approximately half a millimeter.

This „feature“ was really very annoying for me, especially when I just wanted to move the mouse cursor. I obviously can’t say whether it was just a defect in my unit or a characteristic resulting from cost savings, but given that I’m not encountering this „feature“ for the first time on an inexpensive laptop, I would personally guess the latter option. Proof of how much the touchpad annoyed me is the fact that I caught myself several times preferring touch control via the display in some situations – and until now, I considered a touch display on classic laptops unnecessary.

Surprisingly nice hardware

Looking at the hardware specifications of the tested Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome Chromebook, you might turn up your nose; after all, in the world of Windows laptops, it would probably be total low-end on the verge of usability. However, that is, among other things, also the strength of the ChromeOS operating system – it is significantly less demanding on performance. Moreover, the used chipset Intel Processor N100 is significantly better and more modern than the previous Pentiums. First and foremost, it has a TDP of only 6W, which means it can be passively cooled within the laptop body, so the Chromebook does not contain a fan and is completely silent. Otherwise, the processor uses 4 efficient „E“ cores with a clock speed of 0.8GHz boosting up to 3.4 GHz, 6MB L3 cache, and is manufactured using the Intel 7 (10nm) process.

The graphics here are, of course, Intel UHD, in the version with 24 execution units and a clock speed of 750 MHz. It is important to mention that the graphics allow the use of up to 3 displays (display + 2 external monitors) and the maximum video output is 4k at 60 Hz. The RAM in the tested Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome has a capacity of 8 GB and is surprisingly relatively fast LPDDR5 RAM operating at a frequency of 4800 MHz. It’s a shame that savings were made on the internal storage, not only in capacity but also in its type. It is an eMMC 5.1 storage with a capacity of 128 GB.

Gaming on a Chromebook?

You probably can’t expect amazing performance from an inexpensive Chromebook, yet – or perhaps precisely because of that – I was actually pleasantly surprised in this regard. I’ll leave the system performance aside for now, which I’ll come back to, but I also tried several Android games here, and mostly the obstacle was either overall incompatibility or the need to connect at least a gamepad. For example, the latest installment of the racing series Asphalt ran beautifully smoothly here with high details. I also tried some emulators, and this Chromebook handled games for PSP or the first PlayStation smoothly as well, but with PS2 era games, the playability was highly variable.

It also supports various cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now, Boosteroid, and xCloud, and all these services run very well here (within what the given service can offer). I then tested the processor performance using Geekbench 6 and the gaming capabilities, how else, using 3DMark Wild Life Extreme. However, I note that in both cases, these were Android versions of the benchmarks. Based on their results, it could be said that the performance of the Intel N100 in Android applications is only slightly lower than that of the still popular Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset.

Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome benchmarks:

• GeekBench 6 Single core: 1 097 points
• GeekBench 6 Multi core: 2 638 points
• 3DMark Wild Life Extreme: 717 points

Solid connectivity

The manufacturer decided to properly utilize the base thickness, so the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome offers a solid set of connectors without the need to rely on adapters or USB hubs. Specifically, we have one USB-C connector paired with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 controller, which also serves for charging the laptop and supports video output via DisplayPort 1.4. Two „full-size“ USB 3.2 Gen 1, a full-fledged HDMI connector with support for the mentioned 4k output, and a 3.5mm audio jack. A microSD card reader was also not forgotten. Wireless connectivity is covered by dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4.

The battery won’t let you down

The manufacturer boasts up to 12 hours of battery life on a single charge for its inexpensive Chromebook, but as usual, the manufacturer’s claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Personally, with active Wi-Fi, keyboard backlighting, and display brightness set to 3/4 maximum, I achieved a battery life of around 10 hours on a single charge. For most of this time, I usually used the laptop for purely light office work, at most supplemented by a bit of YouTube and social networks. Charging the integrated 3-cell battery with a capacity of 47Wh from 15 to 100% took an average of 2.5 hours. Last but not least, the laptop gets a big plus for its very low power consumption in sleep mode, where even after a few days, only a few percent of energy disappeared.

ChromeOS operating system

I have already written about the ChromeOS operating system and why there is no need to fear it or look down on it, not only in a separate article. So, I’ll take it quickly here. Google’s desktop operating system is characterized primarily by simplicity, both in terms of control and overall operation and maintenance. This also makes devices with this system an ideal choice for less demanding or less skilled users. On the other hand, this does not mean that Chromebooks are suitable only for children and seniors and that’s it.

The success of any operating system stands or falls on the availability of applications, and in this regard, the system is doing better than you might expect. Besides native applications and extensions from the Chrome Web Store, there are also Android applications from Google Play and support for Linux applications, which, however, requires activating developer mode. The growing influence of ChromeOS is also evidenced by the development of a native version of Steam for this operating system – although the tested Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome just barely misses the requirements for its installation.

What it does meet, however, are the requirements for official support until 2031. Even after this year, the Chromebook will not become an unusable doorstop; it will continue to function normally, it just won’t receive new features and improvements. It is also possible that it will receive so-called „extended support,“ but currently, this also means losing access to the Play Store. This would be a great shame, as many Android applications work surprisingly well here. From Discord and Teams to Lightroom and office suites like Microsoft Office or OfficeSuite.

I was actually surprised how well the mentioned office applications are usable. We are still talking about Android versions of these programs, and even Excel doesn’t offer nearly all functions, including macros, but for an undemanding user for home use? Actually, why not. And we still have the suite of cloud applications from Google in reserve, which is also improving year by year. During the time spent with the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome, I did not encounter any problems (not only) with the mentioned applications. The only complications were caused by those that were simply not properly optimized even for tablets, let alone Chromebooks.

You won’t complain about the speed

As for the speed and stability of the system, I have no complaints here. As I already mentioned, ChromeOS is a relatively undemanding system on hardware, so even with what the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome offers, it can function very well. The speed with which the system wakes up from sleep is addictive here; if you don’t want to use a password or PIN for logging in, it feels like the Chromebook wasn’t even asleep and was running the whole time every time you open the lid. However, if you intend to use security and would miss biometric login using a fingerprint on the tested model, you can use a paired smartphone for this purpose.

Connecting with an Android phone obviously plays a big role here, whether it’s quick media sharing, notifications, app streaming, or turning on and connecting to a hotspot for internet sharing. But back to system speed. I was pleasantly surprised by it, given the slow storage used. I would compare the speed of launching Android applications to a mid-range phone; it’s not lightning fast, but you won’t wait long. With native applications, it’s usually even a bit better. Lower performance is sometimes noticeable in animations, which may lose some of their fluidity in some situations.

Similarly, when a larger number of applications are running, the system’s response to some actions – typically keyboard shortcuts or touchpad gestures – can sometimes be slightly delayed. However, this is nothing serious; the delay is in the order of tenths of a second. Moreover, even during more than half a year of testing, no application crashed, nor did I have any other software problems.

Price of Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome

Currently, you can find multiple configurations of the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome on our market. Leave the 4/64GB version on the shelf and definitely go for the 8/128GB variant. Besides that, there is also a version with the Intel Pentium Silver N6000 chipset, so which one to prefer? Clearly the tested variant with Intel Processor N100. This chipset is significantly more modern and more powerful in all aspects than the N6000. The paradox is that with some retailers, the version with N100 is even cheaper. Currently, Alza.cz has a promotion where the blue variant is on sale for 8,489 CZK including VAT. The silver version costs the standard 9,989 CZK including VAT.

Conclusion of the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome review

We are reaching the end of the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome Chromebook review, and I must evaluate my unusually long cohabitation with this piece of hardware. During that time, I surprisingly grew fond of this Chromebook, and despite having several (many times more expensive) computer options available, I reached for the tested Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome practically every day. And it wasn’t just because it was the only one that fit in the drawer of the coffee table. I simply liked its speed, optimal size, and to my own surprise, the convertible design. Its usability is certainly helped by the ChromeOS tablet mode, which is still much more user-friendly and intuitive for finger control than, for example, Windows 11.

Moreover, I am personally very sensitive to noisy computers, and the completely passive operation is also a very significant argument in favor of the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chrome. Just like the decent display with a 16:10 aspect ratio. I very often used the Chromebook for lighter office work such as writing reviews and news articles. Although I would appreciate a slightly better keyboard, looking soberly, I must admit that within the price category, it is definitely not the worst you can encounter. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the touchpad used. If I had to name one thing that should deter me from buying this Chromebook, it would be the touchpad without hesitation.

Editor’s rating: 80 / 100

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