The Lenovo Chromebook Duet? Isn’t that the 10.1-inch tablet with keyboard and kickstand we praised in May 2020 and have been touting ever since as a super value? Well, yes, and that cute detachable Chromebook is still a bargain, but the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook (starts at $429.99; $499 as tested) is something else altogether—a larger 2-in-1 tablet with an ultra-colorful, ultra-high-contrast, 13.3-inch OLED touch screen. You can find faster and cheaper conventional Chromebooks, but the new Duet outshines the recently reviewed HP Chromebook x2 if you’d like a tablet that doubles as a laptop. It earns an Editors’ Choice award as a premium Chromebook detachable.
One Wore Blue, One Wore Gray
Most Windows 2-in-1 laptops are convertibles with keyboards that flip and fold out of the way for use in tablet mode, but among Chromebooks there seems to be a trend for detachables that can jettison their keyboards. Besides the IdeaPad Duet 5 and the 11-inch HP Chromebook x2—which is priced $100 higher but has been widely discounted—we’ve also seen the 10.5-inch Asus Chromebook Detachable CM3.
The Duet 5 has a nominally faster version of the eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c processor seen in the HP Chromebook x2. The $429.99 base model of the Duet 5 at Lenovo.com features a Storm Gray keyboard cover and rear kickstand panel, 4GB of memory, and 64GB of eMMC flash storage. Our $499 test unit is a Best Buy version in Abyss Blue with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
In either configuration, the IdeaPad Duet 5 is a two-tone aluminum tablet with thin bezels around a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel display, measuring 0.28 by 12 by 7.4 inches (HWD) and weighing 1.54 pounds. A front-facing, 5-megapixel camera centered in the top bezel (when the slate’s held in horizontal or landscape mode) serves as a webcam, while an 8-megapixel camera in a rear corner captures snapshots and video.
The Duet 5 comes with two fabric accessories that magnetically latch onto the back and bottom edge, respectively: a rear cover with a fold-out kickstand for propping up the screen in laptop mode, and a keyboard cover with touchpad. The non-backlit keyboard lies flat on your desk instead of having a folding hinge to give it a slight tilt as many detachable keyboards do. The three pieces together weigh 2.24 pounds.
You’ll search in vain for a headphone jack, so you’ll want a set of Bluetooth or USB headphones—the only ports are a pair of USB 3.2 Type-C ports, one each on the left and right edges (assuming the tablet is in landscape mode). There’s a power button at left, and volume up and down buttons on the top edge.
The power plug has a USB-C connector and a cable that’s inconveniently short. When I tried to use the longer USB-C charger for my phone, a Chrome OS pop-up said I’d connected a low-power charger, and the system wouldn’t recharge while turned on. Lenovo says the real charger can restore battery power to 80% in an hour.
‘OLED’ Stands for ‘Awesome’
Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays have hitherto appeared mostly in elite content-creation laptops, so it’s a rare treat to see one in a Chrome OS tablet, or in any laptop-like device in its price range. The Duet 5’s is not only spacious by tablet standards at 13.3 inches, but exceptionally bright (rated at 400 nits) and colorful. (Lenovo says it covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut, as well as shedding 70% less blue light than its rivals.)
Since, by the nature of OLED tech, black pixels are completely shut off, with no backlight peeking behind them, contrast is sky-high (the company rates it at 100,000:1), and white backgrounds are brilliant. Colors are rich and vivid, while black text is razor-sharp with no pixelation. The screen’s 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution makes text and icons appear small, so as with many Chromebooks there’s a choice of “looks like” or scaled resolutions (the default is 1,536 by 864 pixels), though the display quality is so good that native resolution is usable in a way it usually isn’t on high-resolution displays.
The screen’s traditional 16:9 aspect ratio, while great for watching videos, is a little less convenient for tablet use than a 3:2 panel, but the Duet 5 works fine when held vertically or in portrait mode. The touch glass shows some reflections at extreme angles, but is a pleasure to view even then.
The front-mounted webcam captures fairly well-lit and colorful images at resolutions up to 2,592 by 1,944 with just a touch of noise or static. The rear camera is sharp (3,264 by 2,448 pixels) and sensitive, taking high-quality snapshots. Four 1-watt speakers produce clear if slightly tinny audio—drumbeats sound harsh and there’s no real bass, but you can make out overlapping tracks.
Magnetic pogo pins on the bottom edge affix the keyboard cover to the tablet. The keyboard is full-sized (the A through apostrophe keys span the regulation 8 inches) and follows the standard Chromebook layout, with browser and system control keys along the top and a search/menu key in place of Caps Lock. Like other tablets with keyboards and kickstands, the Duet 5 is happier on a desk than in your lap—it barely fit in my lap with the kickstand on my knees, despite having the screen propped near vertical when I would have liked it tilted further back.
The keyboard has a flat, “tappy” typing feel, not as comfortable as a true laptop keyboard but pretty good by tablet keyboard-cover standards. A buttonless touchpad below the space bar glides smoothly. It has a somewhat stiff, shallow click; a two-finger tap serves for a right-click in the familiar Chromebook tradition.
Testing the Duet 5: A Chromebook Variety Pack
There were two obvious candidates to pit against the IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook in our benchmark tests—its fellow tablet-and-keyboard combos, the Asus Chromebook Detachable CM3 and HP Chromebook x2. For the other two slots, I chose 13.3-inch laptops: The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 has a low-end Intel Celeron processor but a high-end OLED display, while the convertible Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 Chromebook boasts a Core i3 CPU and a solid-state drive instead of inferior eMMC flash storage. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
We test Chromebooks with three overall performance benchmark suites—one Chrome OS, one Android, and one online. The first, Principled Technologies’ CrXPRT 2, measures how quickly a system performs everyday tasks in six workloads such as applying photo effects, graphing a stock portfolio, analyzing DNA sequences, and generating 3D shapes using WebGL. The second, UL’s PCMark for Android Work 3.0, performs assorted productivity operations in a smartphone-style window. Finally, Basemark Web 3.0 runs in a browser tab to combine low-level JavaScript calculations with CSS and WebGL content. All three yield numeric scores; higher numbers are better.
Our testing over the years has led us to expect Chromebooks with ARM processors to underperform all but the slowest x86 chips from Intel and AMD. The Duet 5 was no exception, with its Snapdragon CPU besting the MediaTek ARM chip in the Asus and hanging in with the Samsung’s Celeron processor but simply blown away by the Core i3 of the Flex 5 Chromebook. It’s perfectly fine for opening half a dozen browser tabs or playing a single 1080p video or Android game, but not strong enough for serious multitasking.
Two other Android benchmarks focus on the CPU and GPU respectively. Primate Labs’ Geekbench uses all available cores and threads to simulate real-world applications ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning, while GFXBench 5.0 stress-tests both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering that exercises graphics and compute shaders. Geekbench delivers a numeric score while GFXBench counts frames per second (fps).
Finally, to test a Chromebook’s battery, we loop a 720p video file with screen brightness set at 50% and Wi-Fi disabled until the system quits. Sometimes we must play the video from an external SSD plugged into a USB port, but the Duet 5 had enough internal storage to hold the file—though, as with the HP x2, since it had no audio jack we muted the volume instead of having it blaring at 100% for hours.
The Galaxy Chromebook 2 performed miserably in Geekbench but otherwise the two performance benchmarks told the same story, with the IdeaPad Duet 5 again left in the dust by the Core i3 Lenovo. However, despite its bright OLED display the Duet 5 dominated in our battery rundown, with only the Asus coming anywhere near. Our video playback isn’t the most severe battery-drain scenario, and muting the speakers surely helped, but 21 hours is still a remarkable runtime and should make you confident to leave the AC adapter at home.
Cream of the Chrome Crop
The Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook is a great value in our $499 Best Buy configuration. Sure, you’ll get snappier performance from Microsoft’s Core i3-powered Surface Go 3 (under Windows) or Apple’s iPad Air (with iPadOS), but those are smaller tablets that will set you back $730 or $898, respectively, with their optional keyboards. And they can’t match the Duet 5’s dazzling OLED screen.
Neither can the HP Chromebook x2, though that detachable comes with the stylus pen that Lenovo charges an extra $32.99 for. Chrome OS dictates lighter or more casual use than the array of apps available for iPadOS or Windows, but the Duet 5 will satisfy plenty of consumers and students. It deserves a place as one of our Chromebook Editors’ Choice honorees.
