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Overall, the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i 14-inch is well-built, easily handled with a comfortable keyboard and a bright screen, and relatively capable for its price. You certainly wouldn’t use it as a PC gamer—but for general office work, it offers enough performance. The screen is a bit of a wild card, since we tested 400 nits, while Lenovo only promises 300, and the color coverage could use a boost. Make sure you're one step ahead of the game. It can be difficult to keep up with the latest technological advancements when it comes to keeping up with all the latest and greatest. The immediate and long-term benefits of investing in new technology are clear. Prepare for the future with a Lenovo Ideapad 5 Series 11th Generation laptop that will last for many years to come. The new chassis material adds rigidity and having USB Type-C ports on both sides of it is fantastic. Putting all of those on one side should be a criminal offense, in my opinion. I liked the continued inclusion of a physical slider to disable the webcam. The webcam itself is average at best, but serviceable. I can genuinely say that the battery life on Lenovo’s IdeaPad 5i Gen 6 is superb and will be able to get you through multiple days of usage from one charge. Keep in mind that everyone’s battery usage will vary depending on what users are doing. Price All tests were run on the latest Chrome OS 92 Stable Channel, with hyper-threading enabled, and in Guest Mode on a freshly booted machine. All flags were set to the default settings, save for the hyper-threading option.
In most cases, the graphics results were in line with the hardware specs of each convertible—except for the IdeaPad Flex 5i, which came in last on all but one of the tests it completed. The Flex 5i came in ahead of the Asus VivoBook on 3DMark’s Time Spy, the more demanding 3DMark test, but was last on Night Raid, which is supposed to be easier on laptops with integrated graphics.
The speakers are way better than what you would expect from a laptop in this price range. It helps a lot that they are faced upwards, and apart from the fact that they are impressively loud, they also deliver a sound stage that is both wide and fairly balanced with okay bass response, considering their size. They can't compete with a good pair of speakers or headphones, but they will do just fine for watching YouTube videos or a TV show as long as loud and dramatic sound isn't the main focus.
With my WiFi 6 router, I’m getting superb transfer speeds and I haven’t experienced any Bluetooth issues. Battery life is closer to that 8-hour mark that I figured, not the 10 hours that Lenovo claims. Then again, they use a standard controlled test. I simply used the device as I would daily, so your mileage may vary. The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.The sound quality on the IdeaPad 5i Chromebook Gen 6 is decent. It’s not the greatest but does offer plenty no matter what you’re playing. Since the speakers are front-facing, you’re getting the most out of the sound quality versus what you would if the speakers were at the bottom of the laptop. The Yoga 7i and Acer Spin 5 were best on the display tests, scoring 100% of the gamut on the sRGB test. The Flex 5i, Asus VivoBook and Inspiron 14 came in at 69%, 65%, and 64% respectively on the same test. Those three scores in the 60s are a giveaway that these displays are budget products. On the DCI-P3 gamut, likewise, the Acer Spin 5 (85%) and Yoga 7i (80%) showed decent quality with their scores. The other three were in the high 40s or low 50s on the same test, with the Flex 5i coming in third with 52%. The webcam has a standard 720p resolution and offers enough clarity for a video call, whether via Zoom or Google Meet. Battery Life Again, this is a super simple test but installing development tools and testing how long it takes to compile code is likely beyond the scope of most Chromebook users. Should you buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook? We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
Whether that all-rounder approach can help the IdeaPad 5i Chromebook along with being one of the best Chromebooks we’ve tested remains to be seen, though. I’ve been doing some testing to find out. Design and Keyboard The 8GB of RAM on offer provides enough headroom for general computing, and even opening a load of Chrome tabs didn’t make the IdeaPad 5i Chromebook falter. Combined with this, the 256GB SSD is more generous than a lot of other Chromebooks, where some will still feature either 32GB or 64GB of eMMC storage. You could make the case that Lenovo might have done better with a larger battery than the 52.5Wh one it used, even at a modest weight gain. The slightly more power-hungry processor in the Acer Spin 5 didn’t prevent the system from scoring right in the middle on battery life, at 12 hours and 38 minutes. Even after two weeks of using the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, this little laptop continues to surprise me. My first impressions on it mostly discussed the design changes and high-level thoughts. Those haven’t changed. But I also made early observations about the 11th-gen Intel Pentium Gold processor, noting that it impressed me.
The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 is a solid, affordable school laptop
It’s quite common for Lenovo to discount their laptops on a regular basis. But even at the full price, it’s a great value based on my usage. Every day browsing, Android apps, and even some Linux usage are all enjoyable here. As noted, the two hinges offer little play, and the laptop swings easily from closed position through 360 degrees to tablet mode (with the display facing up and the keyboard beneath). The thin bezels framing the display help it seem roomy. The laptop also features a larger ventilation grille on the bottom compared to the 2021 model. I've been a computer-tech writer and editor for several decades, and a photographer who writes about photo techniques and equipment for over a decade. My first job in the tech press was as a writer for Compute! magazine, where we used Commodore 64s from Circuit City as word processors. I next became the editor of Computer Dealer, offering advice to computer retailers, then moved on to Personal Computing as an executive editor, where I developed the magazine's benchmark suite. I held several positions at the massive Computer Shopper magazine before becoming editor in chief. While at Computer Shopper (owned by CNET Networks at the time), I edited bi-annual issues of Technology Review as a joint project with Fortune magazine. If you’re familiar with last year’s slightly smaller model, you’ll see many familiar features. In fact, this isn’t a radical redesign although moving up from a 13.3-inch display to a 14-inch panel does give a little more room in the chassis. This time around there are larger speaker ports alongside the keyboard, for example. These house 2W speakers are tuned with Waves MaxxAudio. The sound quality isn’t bad and the loudness is high for a laptop of this size and price. As noted, the IdeaPad Flex 5i and the Inspiron 14 were best on the PCMark 10 storage test. The Yoga 7i did not complete the test, and the VivoBook S14 came in last. While the Inspiron 14 far exceeded the others on HandBrake, not surprisingly, the Acer Spin 5 pulled the highest scores on Cinebench, Geekbench, and Adobe/PudgetBench. Graphics Tests
As for charging, it comes with a 45W AC adapter that can recharge the battery from low battery to full in about two and a half hours. It’s not the longest wait time, but if you’re near an outlet doing work, you won’t even notice a thing. All comparison systems, except the Asus VivoBook S 14 (S433), scored above 5,000 on the PCMark 10 Full Productivity Test Suite, indicating a laptop fully capable of performing standard office tasks. In fact, 4,000 is the cutoff for that, so all of these units can hold their own with productivity tasks.The problem here is its 45% rated coverage of the NTSC gamut, which left colours feeling quite washed out and not necessarily as punchy as other displays I’ve seen on Chromebooks. For the most part, it’s decent enough, but not the best option if watching video is a priority. In day-to-day tasks and in a suite of synthetic benchmarks, the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook proved to be a nippy performer. This is because of the combination of a lightweight OS in ChromeOS and its snappy Intel Core i3-1215U chip. This provides a total of six cores, split between two P-cores and four E-cores, helping to give the IdeaPad 5i Chromebook an excellent all-round performance. If you’re in the market for a higher-end Chromebook, want a 2-in-1 device, or desire a touchscreen, this isn’t the Chromebook for you. Anyone else on a limited budget should definitely consider the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, although I’d recommend waiting for a sale. To give you an idea of how the 11th-generation Pentium Gold inside the IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, I ran a suite of benchmarks.
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