Can’t decide between a Chromebook or a tablet? The IdeaPad Duet 5 is both, and it’s on sale.
Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5
Lenovo’s IdeaPad Duet 5 is more than just a versatile 2-in-1 Chromebook. With a fully detachable keyboard, it can function as a proper tablet, and its 400-nit 1080p OLED display looks great. If you’re in the market for a Chrome OS machine but can’t quite decide between a tablet or a laptop, the IdeaPad 5 gives you both. That’s hard to argue with at this discounted price.
Chrome OS is only getting more and more popular in an age of cloud-based software and remote work, and the market for Chromebooks has expanded a lot in just the last few years. This means that anybody in the market for a Chrome-powered machine has a lot of options to choose from today. If you’re in that camp and you can’t quite decide whether you want a tablet or a laptop, however, Lenovo might just have the solution in its excellent IdeaPad Duet 5. And better still, it’s on sale right now from Best Buy at $379 for a $120 discount,. That’s a pretty sweet deal when you consider that you’re effectively getting two devices in one.
Why the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 is a multitasker’s dream
Lenovo is one of the leading names in the laptop scene, so it’s no surprise to see its name — and the IdeaPad 5 Duet in particular — listed among the best Chromebooks money can buy. The first Chromebook Duet was one of our favorite 2-in-1s for years, and Lenovo updated the line in late 2021 and improved upon the original in just about every way. One of the bigger upgrades there concerns the display, and the IdeaPad Duet 5 sports a 13.3-inch 1080p OLED touchscreen which looks great. Its output offers 400 nits of brightness, which is noticeably better than the 250-nit panels you typically find on cheaper Chromebooks.
The full-sized detachable keyboard is a much-needed upgrade over the original (which we found to be quite cramped), and four speakers deliver a surprisingly good sound experience. Under the hood, the IdeaPad Duet 5 runs an octa-core Snapdragon processor paired with 8GB of RAM. While that CPU isn’t quite as powerful as a standard AMD Ryzen or Intel Core CPU, the Duet 5 performs admirably, and we found battery life to live up to Lenovo’s claim of “up to 15 hours” in our hands-on tests.
If you’re looking for a Chrome OS device and don’t know if you want a laptop, tablet, or both, then you can’t do much better than the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 for the price. Its fully detachable keyboard makes it much more suitable for tablet use than your run-of-the-mill 2-in-1, and its full-sized keyboard and 13-inch display are just what you need for limited laptop duty. At $379 (down from $499), this versatile Chrome machine proves that in some cases, you can have your cake and eat it, too.
