Lenovo - Chromebook Plus 14" OLED 2K Touchscreen Laptop with Gemini - MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 - 16GB Memory - 256GB UFS - Seashell

Pros: I'm glad we finally have an ARM-based Chromebook Plus. The MediaTek processor on this Chromebook is completely fanless, silent and power efficient while being faster and more powerful than previous MediaTek processors. You can easily go an entire work day without charging, since the battery life lasts over 10 hours with moderate use. The unit has a backlit keyboard and a 14-inch touchscreen that is a bright 400-nits. Another perk is the 16 GB of RAM which allows you to run as many tabs as possible and comfortably run Android apps and some Linux apps side by side without taxing the system. There is a fingerprint reader for extra security, a camera privacy shutter, two USB-C ports, a headphone port, and a USB-A port. The speakers are decent upfiring speakers. Like most Chromebooks, boot-up is almost instant and since I mostly use web apps (Google Docs, Zoom, Meet, Microsoft Office 365, Discord, Google Keep, and WhatsApp), it makes a fast productivity and office machine. The web apps feel like regular apps since they open in their own separate window as PWAs. Cons: Some web apps like Zoom unfortunately have less features than their desktop counterparts (but still work well), such as annotation during share mode. Another downside is that it doesn't run Steam (which runs on some Intel-based Chromebook Plus machines), but this is mostly due to the ARM processor. At the end of the day, as long as you know ChromeOS' strengths (lightweight, secure and speedy) and limitations (no heavy apps or gaming), it makes for a great machine that I find myself using more often than my PC or Mac.

I bought the Lenovo Chromebook Plus because I went into Microsoft Windows 30-day purgatory for inaccurate identification when installing Microsoft Windows on my newly purchased Lenovo yoga aura edition laptop. I am way older than the Chromebook -school era. I have been using dos and windows for 40 years but was forced out of Windows by Microsoft for 30 days. I decided to buy the Chromebook plus as an interim solution and maybe a permanent solution if Microsoft did not allow me back into Windows. I really enjoy using the Chrome OS after Windows, it does take some time to get used to but I think it is worth it. I finally made it back into Windows so I may buy a Windows laptop, but for now I want to learn more about the Chrome OS. I love the ability to use tactile touch on the screen as well as using the integral keyboard. It has great security measures. I think everything is encrypted on the device and when it goes to and is stored off device. I understand that If someone were to take the hard drive off the device and install it on an identical Chromebook, the encryption would still remain and data would be secure. My Chromebook has pin, password, and fingerprint security. I like that.

This Lenovo Chromebook Plus is nicely put together and extremely light. As of design it is not something that wows but is an attractive modern looking device. What really stands out are its specs. It features a 14 inch 2K OLED touchscreen that looks stunning, powered by a Mediatek Kompanio Ultra ARM processor, 256GB of Universal Flash Storage (UFS), and 16GB of RAM. Connectivity options include a USB-C port on each side and a USB-A port. Setting it up was extremely simple especially if you are already in the Android echo system. If you’re a new Android user all you need is a Google account. I currently have an Android phone and all it took was to scan the barcode with my phone, and my account was transferred fast and seamlessly. The screen looks amazing, sharp with vibrant colors. The touchscreen is smooth and highly responsive. Performance wise, this Chromebook handles multitasking like a champ, it is very fast, it swaps between programs with no lag. I was really impressed. The stereo speakers sound good, while not extremely loud but nice and clear with spatial sound. The touchpad is accurate and responsive, I also notice that the scrolling with multi fingers is not in reverse by default as before, swiping up scrolls up and vice versa. The keyboard feels good, the keys are soft and quiet and they are back lit. Adjusting the keyboard brightness, however, requires going into the settings menu unless it is set up to auto. The finger print scanner is quick and reliable . Battery life is also excellent, after several days of moderate use I still had over 50% left. What’s also great about this system is that it runs cool and practically in silence. Overall, this is an impressive Chromebook, fast, smooth, silent, and equipped with a gorgeous 2K OLED display. It’s lightweight and perfect for work, media, and travel. However, despite its premium performance and build, the design doesn’t particularly stand out, and the high price feels a bit hard to justify. In the box, you get the Chromebook, a power adapter, and manuals.

I recently had the opportunity to test out the new Lenovo Chromebook Plus and my experience was much better than I had originally expected. This Chromebook Plus is the perfect blend of power, portability and value. So, let’s go over what the new Lenovo Chromebook Plus has to offer. Design: This laptop looks and feels premium but at the same time being compact, lightweight and travel friendly. Portability is no issue with this laptop being 14” and weighing only about 2.575 pounds making it ideal for on the go. Display: Let’s start off with the first thing you see when you turn this laptop on, which is the display. This Chromebook Plus offers a beautiful 14-in 2K OLED touch screen display (1920 x 1200 resolution) with a 60Hz refresh rate. The colors are vibrant, the text is clear and sharp, making everything from being productive to watching your favorite video a delight. Being a touchscreen laptop is just a plus. It’s super responsive and makes interacting with Windows even more intuitive, like scrolling through photos, surfing the web, using touch controls on videos, and even just simply using the icons on the screen. Performance: I wasn’t sure what to expect since this was my first time trying out a device with the MediaTek Kompanio Ultra chip 8 core processor 3.62 Ghz with 16GB of LPDDR5X, but I was genuinely impressed. This processor is clearly built with ChromeOS in mind, it’s quick, energy-efficient, and handles everyday tasks and multitasking without breaking a sweat. ChromeOS really shines on this setup. It runs super smooth, is simple to navigate, and the deep integration with Google apps makes everything feel effortless. Plus, being able to install and use Android apps adds a whole new layer of flexibility to what this Chromebook can do. Battery life: This is where this laptop shines. The battery life on this thing is phenomenal. One of the best things about this processor is how efficient it is. Chromebooks with the Kompanio 1200 Ultra can easily last a full day, believe me because it has been tried and tested. I took this laptop on a flight from Chicago to Miami which is about a 3.5-hour flight. I was able to be productive, watch a movie and even do some casual browsing on a single charge with battery to spare. Ports: 1 USB-A 3.2 2 USB -C 3.2 Audio Jack WIFI - 7 Pros: • 2K OLED touchscreen • Smooth performance • Long battery life • Quiet and lightweight • Surprisingly loud speakers Cons: • It’s ChromeOS, so it’s not ideal if you need Windows/Mac-only apps Overall, this is a great laptop for someone that is especially looking for the Chrome OS. It’s fast, efficient and ChromeOS is easy to use. It offers a premium display with great sound quality and overall offers excellent performance. If you are in the market for a Chromebook, definitely check this one out.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this Chromebook thus far. Specifically, the battery life, screen and processor are outstanding. This is an amazing all day laptop with great media abilities for the on-the-go user. The addition of ARM allows for great performance with Android apps overall while I experienced no compatibility issues with traditional ChromeOS apps or on Linux. This is the first Chromebook that has made me use it over my Windows or Mac computers due to its versatility and great specs. Pros: Great performance Good speakers Amazing OLED touchscreen It never gets hot! Cons: Keyboard flex Generic design No MicroSD slot Setup: Getting the machine running is extremely easy thanks to the way Chrome OS works. Essentially, you just log in to your Google account, download any updates and you are ready to go. If you have used a ChromeOS computer before, you will be happy that your apps are all restored to your profile in a fairly quick manner. AI/NPU: As this laptop has a 50 TOPS NPU built-in, there are a lot of neat features Google has baked into ChromeOS to support it. First, the Caps Lock key has a diamond with a plus symbol on it. When you click it, it will provide AI-based options on what to do based on where you have set the cursor. For example, if you click it while you are in the browser bar, it will give you simple options to search the text or edit the text. If I use it in a document, it will help me write options, create images, clipboard, date, calculations and more. It is a neat tool to try out but takes some time to get used to adding it to a workflow. Next, the laptop comes preinstalled with NotebookLM. This is a very useful tool which allows you to create a notebook for analysis. You load various documents into it, it provides a summary of all the documents and you can interact with it similar to a smaller LLM that only uses the sources you provide for context. I wish I had this in college to help sift through data! I believe it runs in the cloud but it is a great tool. Smart Grouping appears to be an on-device feature where you swipe up with three fingers on the track pad or press the F4 button to show all your windows. At the bottom you will see suggested groupings which can essentially be made into a new desktop. For example on this review, I have a bunch of tabs open in Chrome concerning this review along with a few apps like Keep. This can be saved for later in the grouping. If you have a lot of Chrome tabs in one browser, it will separate it for you for the new desktop display only. The audio recorder app received an upgrade where it will transcribe and summarize your audio very quickly. I had my daughter sing a song and it transcribed in real time while automatically adding punctuation correctly. The gallery app also received an AI upgrade. Editing a photo now has an AI tab which lets you expand backgrounds, add AI stickers, erase objects and more. Last, when you capture a screenshot, there are options for Google lens and editing the screenshot with AI. Another wonderful tool that migrated from phones to ChromeOS. Compatibility / Linux: I experienced no issues with the ARM based MediaTek Kompanio. Everything I downloaded on ChromeOS worked great and extremely fast. Running Android apps, every game and program I ran ran smoothly, if there were any frame rate hits I suspect they are due to lack of optimization or support from the developer at this time. For example, the game Diablo Immortal runs fine, but is limited to 30fps as the 60fps option is not supported. I am highly confident this processor can easily play that game at full settings but similar to some phones, a future update is sometimes required to support a new processor to run at full capacity. Benchmarks later in the review. Linux: The processor appeared to have no issue running Linux apps. Most of the applications I downloaded were via APT which will download Debian-based distributions. The only program I had to download through the website directly was Visual Studio Code. There, I downloaded the ARM64 Deb version which ran great after sharing and installing with Linux. Otherwise, Thunderbird, Firefox ESR, VIM, LibreOffice, GIMP, Audacity, Calibre, VLC and VS Code (with extensions) all worked without fail. The only program that had a slight issue was Chromium which ran just fine but had a weird window resizing issue when booting. Android apps: As stated before, all Android programs ran with no issue with one exception. I played Star Trek Fleet Command, Diablo, Galaxy of Heroes fine but the only game that didn’t run for me was Call of Duty as it Crashed after loading. Entertainment apps such as Crunchyroll, Disney+, HBO, Hulu gave me no issues. Netflix is not yet optimized for the laptop though as it only runs in SD with no HDR. It runs fine with all the bells and whistles in the Chrome browser. All my reading and podcast applications ran fine as well. Android based benchmarks had some lower than expected results but I suspect that even though the apps were made for ARM and running on an ARM processor, there is likely a performance hit running between layers from the ChromeOS to the Android OS, but I’m not an expert on that. Native Chrome benchmarks: Basemark Web 3.0 - 1728 Speedometer 3.1 - 21.4 CrXPRT 2 - 208 Android benchmarks: Geekbench 6 plugged in - 2069 Single / 7238 Multi Geekbench 6 battery - 2362 Single / 6441 Multi Geekbench 6 GPU plugged in - 17474 Geekbench 6 GPU battery - 16245 Geekbench AI NNAPI - 635 / 570 / 1305 Geekbench AI GPU - 12666 / 984 / 947 Wild Life Extreme - 4221 25.28 fps avg Steel Nomad Light 1559 11.55 fps avg PC Mark Work 3.0 - 17399 These are some of the highest benchmark numbers I have personally seen on a Chromebook so great job to Lenovo and MediaTek there! Heat management: The addition of an ARM processor means NO FANS! This helps keep the laptop slim and running cool all the time. The hottest I could get it to run was at 100C when I did the CPU stress test in the diagnostics menu. It never got hotter than that and I could never feel any heat other than some minor warmth near the top of the keyboard so the heat dissipation is extremely effective. The average temperature it runs at during simple browsing and document editing is about 44C internally. Also, with this design, there are no vents on the bottom with only a wavy pattern which helps grip when carrying it around. Battery: The ARM processor truly allows for all-day use. I watched 1 hour of Netflix within the Chrome browser and only lost 3% of battery. My projected remaining time varied from 8 hours to 12 hours depending on what I was doing. I did not see any noticeable performance hit on the battery or plugged in. Oddly enough my single core score went up in Geekbench 6 with multi-core going down. I would have no concern going to school or work without an AC adapter unless I was doing intensive battery draining work on it. Standby time seems to last forever. Display: The OLED display is perfect for my needs. Doing photo editing is great due to the brightness and color accuracy. It is high resolution so pixels are impossible for my eyes to see. The touchscreen is responsive and works well in games (though a full flip screen or pen would be nice). Audio: The top and bottom mounted speakers are loud and clear. The bass is a bit limited by the four 2W speakers until you turn the volume up, but they are amazing for the size. They support Dolby Atmos as well. I/O: The keyboard is the usual Lenovo high-quality feel. The only complaint I have about the keyboard is the board has a lot of flex if you push on it, but you wouldn’t notice just typing The mouse is glass and feels very accurate. Unfortunately it is a diving board style with no haptics. The fingerprint reader works every time for me and allows for up to three fingers to be paired. There are two USB-C ports, one on each side. Both can be used to charge the device via USB-PD 3.0. The left side also has a USB-A while the right side has a 3.5mm headphone jack. All USB ports are USB 3.2 Gen 1 supporting up to 5 Gbps. Camera: The camera is average at best and I found it to be a little overexposed at most times. I would not use it for photos but works just fine for video calls. There is a privacy cover that turns the camera red when switched on so you can easily see at a glance that it is off. Repairability: The battery appears to be replaceable and the bottom is easily removable. There are only 6 Phillips head screws on the bottom with no hidden ones. I was able to remove them all with a PH0 sized screwdriver and it easily pried off. There is a small hook in the middle which you will need to wiggle loose from the chassis to remove the cover. All the other modules with the exception of the Wi-Fi 7 module are soldered on so replacement would require the replacement of an entire board.