Slick and thin
LAPTOP ❘ £349 from www.snipca.com/49572
Like most things in life, one general rule when buying a laptop is that the less you spend on it, the more compromises you should expect. We experienced such trade-offs recently when testing the IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 (£459 from www. snipca.com/49046, reviewed in Issue 677) – an affordable Windows laptop in the same range.
This slightly smaller machine runs Google’s ChromeOS instead and is even cheaper (available from Argos at the time of writing for £349). Despite this low price, however, it offers reasonably good specifications, a screen that’s better than the average budget laptop, and longer battery life than most.
This is small by the standards of your typical 14in laptop, measuring just 324x216mm (WxD) and 19.3mm at its thickest point (when closed). Weighing just 1.5kg, it’s easy to take with you when you’re out and about. Only the lid is aluminium, but there’s barely any flex or give anywhere on what is otherwise a plastic chassis. There’s no noise when you work, not even when it’s pushed to the limit with more demanding apps.
Connectivity is slightly disappointing. There’s only one USB-C port on the left-hand edge, along with two USB 3.0 sockets – one on either side. Also, the one USB-C port is needed for charging, which is annoying. On the plus side, it has an HDMI socket for easy connection to a monitor, and up-to-date wireless standards – Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1 – built in.
The keyboard layout makes the most of the limited space and the keys are fairly comfortable to type on, though there was inconsistency across the board, with some keys feeling tighter and offering a little more ‘click’ than others. There are some nice touches, though, including backlighting, which you wouldn’t normally find on a laptop this cheap. The touchpad is small, measuring just 105x62mm, which doesn’t provide much room for manoeuvre.
The Chromebook 14’s screen exceeded our expectations, and it’s better than the larger screen on Lenovo’s 15in Windows IdeaPad. The company claims a 300cd/m2 maximum brightness level, but in our tests it actually peaked at 329cd/m2. And while its colour palette can’t match top-of-the-range models, its sRGB coverage of 61 per cent means image quality remains high.
Lenovo has built the Chromebook 14 around Intel’s Core i3-N305 processor. Unlike other Core i3 chips this is an eight-core model, but these are all Efficiency cores rather than the P
