Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 Chromebook review: Everyday champion

Lenovo's latest entry in the Chromebook market is the IdeaPad Flex 5. It promises a better experience than some cheaper Chromebooks thanks to a better design and higher-end hardware, and we had a chance to test drive one a little early.

The selling point here is that you're getting more capable hardware for a bit more money. But is that worth the extra investment when some of the cheaper Chromebooks honestly hold up pretty well? Let's find out.

Design

The IdeaPad Flex 5 costs anywhere from about $360 to over $400, depending on configuration. For that price I don't think you really expect a ton out of a laptop's design and construction, but this thing could legitimately hold up to laptops at twice the price.

The build quality is excellent, despite being made of plastic. There's a solid amount of weight here without being too heavy, and there's very little flex or give that you normally see in cheaper laptops. The hinge for the screen seems incredibly sturdy, and it's overall very well balanced regardless of how you use it.

The backlit keyboard is stellar with plenty of spacing and a good amount of travel on the keys, and I can honestly say I like this keyboard more than most $1000 laptop keyboards with their extremely thin, low-travel switches. You could type for days on the Flex 5.

On the other hand, the trackpad does certainly feel like something out of a more affordable laptop. It's decent, and it'll get the job done, but the click does sound kind of cheap and it isn't the most precise input device around. In Lenovo's defense, however, that could definitely fall on Chrome OS's trackpad drivers. I wouldn't let that deter you from the laptop as a whole, but you can do better if the trackpad is a top priority.

You'll find two very solid speakers beside the keyboard, which sound good and are excellently placed, and there's a good selection of ports on the laptop. On the left side you'll find a USB-C port, a USB-A port, a headphone jack, and a microSD card. Opposite that you'll see Kensington lock, another USB-C port, a power button, and volume buttons. Seeing dedicated volume buttons on a laptop is kind of strange (you'll still have your volume keys on the keyboard) but it does make sense if you're primarily using this as a tablet.

Overall, for the price, I don't think you could ask for anything else out of a $400 laptop.

Specs

Performance

The ThinkPad Flex 5 that we reviewed uses an Intel Core i3-10110U CPU clocked at 2.1GHz. For a Chromebook, that's a legitimately pretty powerful processor, and there are very little tasks you can throw at it to slow things down. But what's strange is the amount of RAM that Lenovo decided to pair with this higher-end (relatively speaking) CPU and how it tends to mismatch the performance you'll get from this laptop.

We've only 4GB of RAM to work with here, and that fills up pretty quickly, leaving the processor bottlenecked by memory. If you're heavy into multitasking you'll still notice a little bit of slowdown when dealing with multiple tabs, and even just writing this review with a YouTube video playing you could occasionally see some dropped frames and reloads when hopping around between tabs. Chrome is already notoriously RAM-hungry, and that's very apparent when you start to use a Chromebook like this as a productivity machine.

If you're not trying to handle a ton of multitasking or productivity work, you'll honestly rarely run into issues. I could watch YouTube with no hiccups, playing around with some Android apps and games was fine, and I even had some HTML5 games running without a hitch. There's a pretty fine line between your everyday tasks and more serious productivity work that this laptop gets close to, but never quite crosses.

The screen is pretty great, and the speakers on the sides of the keyboard are loud and distinct. They could do with a little more low-end, but most music apps will have some kind of EQ to help you adjust things to fill out the sound a little bit.

My only gripe with the display is that you can find some pretty noticeable backlight bleed in particularly dark scenes or movies. Watching Game of Thrones or something is going to put that issue front and center, but even in black fades in YouTube videos and other things would show edges of the screen bleeding and blooming. In everything else it's honestly a pretty good display for this price, but beware if you're trying to find a top-end home theater PC.

Also worth noting is that this Chromebook sports WiFi 6 connectivity, giving it a bit of a future-proofed edge over some competitors.

Battery

Lenovo claims you'll get about 10 hours of battery life out of the ThinkPad Flex 5, which is definitely optimistic but could still be reasonable depending on what you're doing. Lots of web browsing should get you there, but in my usage trying to watch videos or listen to music would cut that battery life back down to 6 or 7 hours, on average. Still pretty decent, especially since it recharges relatively quickly.

You're getting a 45W adapter in the box, although as always I'm a pretty big fan of some newer GaN chargers for their smaller size and quicker speeds.

Chrome OS

The Lenovo ThinkPad Flex 5 works pretty much identically to most other Chromebooks, and is just about a carbon copy of the C340 Chromebook from Lenovo that we reviewed a few months ago. We're going to paste that part of our review here for brevity, but you can always check out that review for another look at the software here.

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?

It seems like there aren't very many middle-of-the-road options for Chromebooks. You're either getting something really cheap that comes with a lot of compromises, your have to shell out for a Pixelbook that's painful on the wallet. Lenovo's ThinkPad Flex 5 manages to comfortably slot into the middle of the market for anyone that wants to go with Chrome OS.

The hardware you're getting is perfectly capable, despite the need for a little more RAM, but it's clear that Google and its partner manufacturers have decided that Chrome OS is more of an everyday machine, not your workhouse laptop that can handle video editing. And with that in mind, it's really hard not to like what Lenovo's cooked up here.

You've got a decent processor, 64GB of storage for holding a few apps and Chrome extensions, a solid touchscreen, good speakers and display, and long battery life, all for a pretty affordable $400ish price tag. That's hard to beat, especially on the Windows side of things. It's not perfect, and it's not for everyone, but I think this makes a great choice nearly every average user on the internet.

Read more: Lenovo (Coming soon)