The Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5 (or IdeaPad Duet 5 for readers outside of North America) is a new 2-in-1 Chromebook that includes a detachable keyboard and stand. Lenovo claims this is the “world’s first detachable Chromebook with an OLED display,” and based on the specs, it looks to be a great screen indeed.
Although it’s a follow-up to the original Lenovo Chromebook Duet, the upgrades are wide-ranging this time around. The star of the show is the 13.3-inch Full HD OLED display. Lenovo says this screen is capable of 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which should make video and photo content look remarkably accurate.
The company also highlighted the strengths of OLED technology, including a 70 percent reduction in blue light to help with eye strain. The reduced power consumption of the OLED screen should do wonders for battery life as Lenovo claims up to 15 hours of life on its 42 watt-hour battery.
On the inside, the Duet 5 sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 system on a chip (SoC), up to 8GB of LPDDR4x memory, and up to 256GB of eMMC storage. Connectivity includes Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.1. It features two USB-C ports for charging and a headphone jack.
It also features a quad-speaker array with an “amplifier” for video calls, as well as USI stylus support. The Duet 5 will come in either a two-toned Storm Gray or Abyss Blue colors.
The Chromebook Duet 5 features a 5-megapixel camera on the front for video calls and an 8-megapixel camera on the back. Lenovo pointed out that many people use these 2-in-1 computers as mobile devices for video calling. This is especially true today when many people are still conducting school and business from home due to the pandemic.
The last time we saw a Snapdragon 7c-powered Chromebook was the HP Chromebook x2 11 (which also featured a detachable keyboard). According to About Chromebooks, the performance of the Snapdragon 7c is better than Intel’s Celeron processors and roughly in line with the Pentium Silver line. Don’t expect any blazing performance, but the 7c is more than capable of its intended purpose of consuming content and browsing the web.
Fortunately, your wallet won’t take a hit from all of that OLED goodness. Pricing starts at $430 with availability starting next month. Considering that all versions of the Chromebook Duet 5 come with the OLED screen and a detachable keyboard, this seems to be a great value for the money.
