Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsBetter Options Available
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2019
I purchased this Chromebook after my 4 year old Toshiba Chromebook 2 finally started having issues. I paid almost the same price back in 2015 for the Toshiba that I did for the Lenovo. I was hoping to find a similar quality machine and boy was I wrong. Here are the main issues with the Lenovo.
Screen Quality - I have no idea what Lenovo was thinking with this screen. You have to have the perfect angle to see anything, and even once you find that angle, it still looks like garbage. The colors are always washed out, black text on a white background looks almost grey. This is embarrassing for a lcd screen made in the past 10 years.
Speakers - I listen to a lot of videos and music on my chromebook. My old Toshiba had amazing sound for a chromebook, and I was not expecting to find the same quality without paying for it. But the “speakers” that the Lenovo have are hilarious. I can’t believe how bad they are. Not only are they very flat and hollow sounding, you can barely hear them at max volume. I even tried using the “Audio EQ” extension, that allows you to boost the preamp and increase volume. Even with that it truly sounds like you have headphones plugged in, sitting on the desk with the volume max. Terrible!
Wifi - I have plenty of devices in my home running on a 5Ghz connection with 100+ mb/s internet. Everything works fine...But the Lenovo. Sitting 5’ away from the router shows a “medium” connection strength. This translated when trying to watch videos and every new video had to “load” for a second, before dropping the quality down for a minute or two while the computer tried catch up.
The battery seemed to hold up after a day of "Using it". Mainly trying to find if some setting was causing all of the issues and poor quality.
The keyboard felt fine. Trackpad was fine.
I ended up returning this and buying the Acer Chromebook 14. These two should not be within $300 of each other. If the Lenovo was a $150 chromebook, I could argue that for the price, at least it kind of works. But when they are asking the same price as some of the other brands that are much higher quality, I had to leave a review to warn others. I use a $2500+ Lenovo workstation laptop everyday as an engineer and I have nothing bad to say about it. But this Chromebook is garbage. Don’t buy it. Find other options.
