Meet the Lenovo C340 11″ Chromebook. It's a solid little contender in the market of Chrome-powered laptops, and Lenovo is hoping that there's enough value in its $309 price tag to make it worth checking out over the competitors.

We got our hands on one for a few weeks to see what all the fuss is about, and see if it's worth looking at as your next laptop. Let's dig in.

Design

At around $300 it's really not fair to expect the world out of the design of any gadget or device, but the C340 still isn't particularly attractive. Bezels are large, especially for an 11-inch laptop, but it could be worse.

The top of the laptop is made of metal, and we had a chance to use the Pink Sand color. The bottom chassis is plastic, but Lenovo did a pretty good job of coordinating those colors so they don't look jarringly different. You will notice the difference handling the laptop, however.

But for all of the aesthetic decisions, this Chromebook feels surprisingly good in hand. It's weighty without feeling heavy, which is crucial for something that you'll be carrying around or using folded up, and the hinges are very secure. There's way less wobble than you'd expect out of a sub-$500 machine. It weighs just 2.6 pounds, which I don't hate at all.

It's not all that thin, but you do get a decent suite of ports and connectivity out of it. There are two USB-C ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a microSD card slot for expanding the storage out of the C340.

The top of the lid houses the embedded Lenovo and Chrome logo, which also feel pretty nice. All in all, I think you'd struggle to guess that this Chromebook only costs $300, but it also won't fool you into thinking it's a $1000 machine, either.

Specs

Performance

The Lenovo C340 isn't a super high-end machine, which is pretty evident from its Intel Celeron N4000 CPU. It won't crunch numbers at record speed, and you're probably not going to be any 4K video rendering here, but it gets the job done. Usually, anyway.

The N4000 is fairly old at this point, originally being introduced back in 2017. It can still handle modern tasks, but multitasking can really set this thing back. To be fair, however, that could also just be the 4GB of RAM, which is less than what some phones in similar price points ship with these days. If you're just doing one thing at a time, you're honestly never going to sweat anything, but opening a ton of different things all at once can show some lag. Animations aren't ever particularly smooth, but it does run Android apps fairly well, so long as they're optimized for it. Apple Music was a nightmare to use, but hey, Google wants you on YouTube Music, anyway.

But in the C340's defense, using it a light-duty machine was just fine! Google Docs works well (performance-wise, anyway) and I had no trouble writing up posts with this Chromebook as my daily machine, despite some frustrations with Chrome OS. Now using a couple Android apps in the background while listening to music or watching a YouTube video? Eh, there was some stuttering. Not the worst thing ever, but it can be frustrating if you're used to some higher-end devices.

Battery

Lenovo claims you'll get about 10 hours of battery life on a single charge, and I think they're pretty close to the mark here. Getting that full 10 was tricky, especially using it as a productivity machine with a fair amount of multitasking or video watching, but if you need to sit down and hammer out 8 hours of work or make it through a school day, I don't think you'd have a problem.

It recharges in decent time, and I pulled about 45% of a charge from an hour of being plugged into one of our RAVPower USB-C PD GaN chargers. You're looking at a little over three hours for a full charge, which isn't awful, but might stress you out if you forget to recharge it overnight.

Keyboard, trackpad, display

The keyboard is surprisingly nice with a decent, firm feel, although with quite a bit of travel. I type a ton, obviously, but don't have any real complaints here. If you don't like higher keycaps this might not be your favorite keyboard, but I use cherry MX blue switches in my main mechanical keyboard, so typing with a little more force doesn't bother me. There's virtually no bend or sag, though, which I'm a huge fan of. It is not backlit, however, so keep that in mind.

The trackpad is, well, okay. This is generally where you can tell the difference between an entry-level and high-dollar machine, and the C340 is no exception. It gets the job done, but it's never as precise as you'd like and I'd hate to really use this thing as a gaming machine. I guess that's not really what it's designed for, so it's not fair to take points away for that.

The display is somehow both good and bad, which is a feat on its own. Lenovo has used an IPS display here, so colors are rich and vibrant and viewing angles are great, but it's really just not a great display otherwise. Text can look a little jagged, and it doesn't get bright enough in certain scenarios, capping out at just 250 nits. This is definitely a screen that's best used a video playback device in your house, not so much as a productivity, on-the-go companion.

The speakers suck. Cheap devices have bad speakers, and I'm definitely overly-critical here, but you should almost definitely get headphones or some Bluetooth speakers to take care of that if you care how things sound.

Chrome OS

While this isn't a review of Chrome OS, let's talk a little bit about it, since it's mostly what you'll be dealing with here. If you're not familiar with it, Chrome OS, and by extension, this Chromebook, runs pretty much everything exclusively through Chrome, and it uses an Android emulator for apps that you can grab from the Play Store. YouTube and Google Docs will just open in Chrome tabs, but they'll also have all of your saved passwords and files, which is cool. If you're not heavily invested in Google's ecosystem, this isn't going to be a fun time for you.

There are some definite advantages to Google's approach here, most of which center around performance-per-dollar and security. Google updates Chrome all the time to patch exploits, and since you won't really be running any program's code you don't have to worry about viruses and the like. It also means that if the thing you want doesn't have a web page or app, you're screwed.

There's also no caps lock key on Chromebooks, which is instead replaced by a search key. You shouldn't use CAPS LOCK anyway, but… it's weird.

I do like the seamlessness of Chrome OS, if you treat it like a high-powered Android device. That's basically what Google's trying to turn their platform into. It gets full access to your YouTube playlists, your purchased movies from the Play Store, your apps and games, everything you've saved in Google Drive, and so on. It's really cool. But some things, like the lack of a right-click and the limited RAM, or the lack of a real file browser, highlight how difficult Chrome OS might be on your workflow. For some things, yes, it's just fine, but not everything.

Worth it?

At its price point, I think Lenovo has done a great job of making a fun little Chromebook. But you know that saying “you get what you pay for?” Well, it's not far off.

$300 isn't bottom-tier by any stretch, but the C340 doesn't really manage to punch above its weight class in any significant way. You're not getting ripped off, but you're not getting a steal of a machine, either. As a productivity machine, I'd lean towards no, but for casual use like watching videos, checking Facebook, and playing around with a few apps, then yeah, I think you can do far worse than what Lenovo is offering.

Lenovo