Lenovo: tablet hybrid with detachable keyboard in review

Chromebooks have experienced a significant boost in recent years. Working from home and distance learning have boosted the demand for robust, inexpensive and at the same time powerful notebooks. Google’s Chrome OS operating system makes a significant contribution to the success of Chromebooks: It’s slim, easy to use, almost immune to malware and practically impossible to break even through bad software or fumbling with system settings. Another advantage that not everyone knows: If you fold the keyboard flush to the back of notebooks with a 360-degree hinge, Chrome OS switches to what is known as tablet mode. All installed apps are then displayed with icons on the home screen, as with iOS, and the entire system can be operated quite conveniently with touchscreen gestures.

For many users, however, notebooks with flip hinges are too thick and too heavy. Hybrid devices are suitable for them, whose keyboard they can remove from the display with a flick of the wrist and put to one side. Most of the tablet-notebook hybrids – such as the CM3 from Asus or the IdeaPad Duet 3 from Lenovo – are quite handy with diagonals of around 8 to 11 inches. They are more like tablets that you occasionally use for typing with a keyboard attached. Many of them are hardly suitable as main computers; they often have slow hardware and puny keyboards with spongy actuation points.

service

Above all, the size of Lenovo’s IdeaPad Duet 5 deserves praise, because with a screen diagonal of 13.3 inches and thus a width of 31 centimeters, it offers exactly the space for a sufficiently large keyboard – and is therefore suitable as a notebook.