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Our verdict
The Lenovo 100S Chromebook has a very attractive price and excellent battery life.
To the
Long battery life
Very easy
Payable
Against
Mediocre ad
Stiff touchpad
Bad sound quality
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As a group, Chromebooks are some of the cheapest laptops you can buy, but even in this budget segment, Lenovo's 100S Chromebook stands out by offering a lot of laptop for very little money. Get it for a starting price of $179.99 You're getting a lightweight 11.6-inch laptop with solid performance and 11+ hours of battery life. As you'd expect, Lenovo cuts a few corners to get there, but if you can live with flaws like a so-so display and weak audio, the 100S Chromebook is a really compelling buy.
Design: All in black
From an aesthetic point of view, the Lenovo 100S Chromebook is as simple as it gets. The laptop's outer casing is made entirely of black plastic with a subtle textured pattern. Inside, the chiclet-style keyboard and bezels are made of black matte plastic.
The palm rest is (you guessed it) black and picks up fingerprints very easily. It's basic, but it fits anywhere from the boardroom to the dorm room. A metallic frame around the touchpad adds a touch of class.
Although the mostly plastic construction makes this Chromebook very light and portable, it doesn't feel durable. It's so light it feels like you could break it with your hands, and the hinge is a little limp. If If you're traveling with it, you may want to invest in a laptop bag or sleeve to protect it.
You can take the 100S anywhere. It measures 11.81 x 8.23 x 0.78 inches — small enough to fit in almost any pocket — and weighs just 2.52 pounds. These measurements are consistent with other new ultraportables Devices match.The
Asus EeeBook X205TA
(11.2 x 7.6 x 0.6 inches and 2.16 pounds) is slightly lighter and smaller. The
Dell Chromebook 11
is noticeably thicker and heavier at 11.6 x 7.9 x .91 and 2.8 pounds, while the
HP stream 11
(12 x 8.1 x 0.78 inches and 2.74 pounds) is only slightly larger and heavier.
keyboard and touchpad
The Lenovo 100S Chromebook's keyboard is a little stiff, but better than you'd expect from a notebook this cheap. The keys have a whopping 2mm of travel - more than most mainstream laptops - and require 65 grams of force to press, which is theoretically too would result in great tactile feedback, but is a bit muddy in practice.
On the plus side, there's almost no flex - something we often experience with cheaper notebook keyboards. Everything is just a tiny bit cramped in the 11-inch body, but it's still usable. I was able to do the same with 10fastfingers.com Maintained typing speed as on a Dell Office keyboard: around 100 words per minute. However, on the 100S, my error rate reached 4 percent, compared to my usual 1 or 2 percent.
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Best Lenovo Laptops
The buttonless touchpad is precise, but requires some force to click. Clicks registered better on the bottom half of the touchpad than the top half, resulting in an annoying number of unresponsive clicks until I finally got used to it , just press all the way down.
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The 100S' 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel resolution is par for the course for budget notebooks. The screens on the Dell Chromebook 11, EeeBook X205TA, and Stream 11 share the same size and resolution
Asus Chromebook Flip
, a Chromebook with a 10-inch touchscreen that folds back into a tablet, has a resolution of 1200 x 800 pixels.
Watching the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, I could see the sweat and dirt on Finn and Rey's faces after the action in the desert, but missed some of the colors and details of the Millennium Falcon and X- Wing fighters. The overall display is a bit washed out, especially at wider viewing angles. Many details, like the creases in Rey's robes, were lost at 45 degrees left or right.
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I wish the display was brighter, but at 244 nits it's still taller than the screens on the HP Stream 11 (165 nits) and Asus EeeBook X205TA (217 nits). They all fall below the ultraportable category average of 294 .7 nits. The 100S also renders just 57.5 percent of the sRGB color space, while the X205TA and Stream 11 render 64 and 68 percent, respectively.
Audio
The Lenovo 100S Chromebook produces hollow, tinny sound from two small speakers on the bottom of the laptop. They send sound down and toward your lap, table, or desk and away from you, so the sound becomes less clear as the volume increases.
When I heard "Ten Duel Commandments" and "Satisfied" from the original Broadway cast recording of "Hamilton," I realized the 100S wasn't a good way to showcase the best American musical in recent memory. both rapped and sung, were understandable, but the background music and ensemble were mute and muddy.
heat
The Lenovo 100S Chromebook gets a little warm on the bottom. After the Chromebook played videos on Hulu for 15 minutes, the bottom of the notebook reached 100 degrees, which is 5 degrees above our comfort threshold. However, the 100S's touchpad was cool at 76 degrees and the distance between the G and H keys on the keyboard reached 85 degrees.
Connections and webcam
An 11-inch computer can only have a limited number of ports, and the 100S Chromebook has the essentials.
On the right is a single USB 2.0 port and a Kensington lock slot. On the left is the charging port, an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 port, an SD card slot, and a headphone jack.
Webcam images are noisy (especially in low light) and muddy. In a photo taken in our well-lit Manhattan office, my face was very blurry and detail in my hair and beard was lost.
perfomance
The 100S is powered by a 2.16GHz Intel Celeron N2840 processor with 2GB of RAM. It's pretty snappy for light loads, but it maxed out when I was really working on it. With a Google Doc and 10 Chromecasts open Tabs and Spotify streaming in the background The tabs would lag when I switched between them. When I added a game of Cut the Rope in the background, the lag was even more noticeable.
In synthetic tests, the 100S Chromebook also fell well behind other newer (albeit larger and more expensive) Chromebooks. It completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 589.9 milliseconds, which is much slower than the 367 ms time of the 1.5- GHz Celeron 3205U-powered Dell Chromebooks and the 1.7 GHz Intel Celeron 3215U-powered Toshiba Chromebook 2 (1.70 GHz Intel Celeron 3215U, 4GB .). RAM), which took 324.9 ms.
On Oort Online's WebGL benchmark, which tests how well a computer can render graphics in a browser, the 100S achieved a score of 1,430. In a test where higher scores are better, it was beaten by the Dell Chromebook 13 and Toshiba Chromebook 2 wiped out with 5,050 and 5,070 points respectively.
The 100S Chromebook also fell in the Browsermark test, which provides an overall score based on common browser actions such as resizing a screen, loading pages, graphics support, and JavaScript. Lenovo's laptop scored a low 2,393, while Dell scored 4,199 and Toshiba scored 4,576 (higher better).
Battery Life: This Chromebook lasts and lasts
The Lenovo 100S Chromebook lasted an impressive 11 hours and 19 minutes in the laptop battery test, which includes continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 100 nits of brightness, beating out the Asus Chromebook Flip (9:19) and the HP Stream 11 (6:34 ).
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It also lasted longer than the ultraportable category average of 8:02, but was almost an hour behind the Windows-powered Asus X205TA, which ran for 12:05.
Chrome operating system
If you know how to use the Chrome browser, you know how to use Chrome OS. Most of the interface is the browser itself, so it's easy to get used to.
The home menu has a helpful search bar that takes you straight to the browser. Google Now takes center stage and is incredibly useful. It told me how long my commute would take, as well as predicting it so I'd be out the door and was able to get to work on time. It also made me aware of the latest news and sports scores.
The desktop is fairly spartan. Those using Windows will recognize the taskbar (Chrome OS calls it the "shelf") and pinned apps in a familiar spot at the bottom of the screen. On the right side of the shelf is a clock, a wireless network -Status, a battery and a profile switcher.
software and warranty
Unlike most Windows computers, Chromebooks don't come preinstalled with third-party software. When I signed in with my Google credentials, all I found were the Google apps and extensions I already use.
What the 100S comes with is two years of free 100GB storage on Google Drive - a welcome addition. That will store many of your documents and media in the cloud. However, after the 24-month period is up, you'll need to purchase an extension of $1.99 a month do it yourself and pay for it. The notebook also comes with a one-year limited parts and labor warranty.
The Chrome Web Store is hit or miss. It has many apps and extensions to help you get your job done, and many of them are free. Some of my favorites included Google Docs, Pocket (to save content to read later ), Spotify (for music streaming), and games like Cut the Rope. There are many apps and extensions to choose from, but you'll miss some of the dedicated productivity programs and games available on Windows and OS X computers.
Chrome OS requires an internet connection for everything from browsing the web to syncing Google Docs to streaming music and videos. Only a few offline-enabled apps are available, including a special version of Gmail called Gmail Offline. A number of Games like 2048 and Cut the Rope are available offline, as are some text editors like Writebox and Scribe.Google Drive has limited functionality in offline mode, but will sync again when you have an internet connection.
configurations
The base configuration of the 100S Chromebook sells for $179.99 on both Lenovo.com and retailers like Amazon. This model (the one we tested) comes with 16GB of flash storage and 2GB of RAM.
A $199 model increases storage to 32GB, and the $229.99 version offers more storage and 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB.
bottom line
Whether you're buying it for a kid or just need a very portable device for email, document editing, and social media on the go, the Lenovo 100S Chromebook is a great choice. If you're willing to spend more, the $279
Dell Chromebook 11
has a better design with a better keyboard and touchpad. However, with its epic battery life, solid performance, and light weight, the 100S Chromebook is a steal that's hard to ignore.
Pricing - Lenovo 100S Chromebook:
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Lenovo 100S Chromebook specifications
Bluetooth
Bluetooth 4.0
brand
Lenovo
CPU
Intel Celeron processor N2840 (2.16GHz 1333MHz 1MB)
card slots
4-1 card reader
corporate website
http://lenovo.com/
screen size
11.6
graphic card
Intel HD graphics
disk size
16GB SSD
disk type
eMMC
native resolution
1366x768
operating system
Google Chrome
Connections (except USB)
Headphone/microphone combo jack, HDMI, SD card slot, Security lock slot, USB 3.0, USB 2.0
R.A.M.
2GB
RAM upgradeable to
4GB
size
11.81 x 8.23 x 0.78 inches
touchpad size
2.5 x 4.125 inches
USB ports
2
Weight
2.52 pounds
Wireless Internet access
802.11ac
Fewer
