BEST LAPTOP 2022

              Lenovo flex 5 Chromebook

In January I kind of shrugged my shoulders it just looked like another Chromebook and for all intents and all purposes it kind of is just another Chromebook but there are some things in this device that set it apart and make it what I feel like is going to be something that disrupts the entire Chrome OS ecosystem and I want to talk to you about all those things all the goods all the bad and all the ways I think this just kind of nondescript looking Chromebook is going to make a big difference in the market before we get into all that this video is brought to you by Nord VPN there the VPN of choice for millions of customers.they're awesome at what they do and that is keeping your browsing safe and secure whether you're at home or on the go if you'd like to learn more about them and their services head over to Chrome and vox com forward slash North VPN to learn more and get started today before we get into all the pieces of this review is just like the duet before it I want to mention the price of  the device is the top-level one you can buy right now and it's only four hundred nine dollars MSRP so that's no deals

that's no bargains that are no discounts that's what it cost out of the box at any retailer at any given time so that's an important thing to note because just like with the duet pricing forms your purchasing decisions and so whenever you have a device at six or $700 there are things that we can get a little nitpick about whenever devices are like four a hundred bucks and they compete with devices that are six and seven hundred dollars there are certain things I'm going to give it a pass on so as we go through all these pieces here I want to mention that right up front because it's very important to the makeup of this Chromebook so let's start with the build quality I'd give it a solid B plus to an A here and it's you know this is a convertible Chromebook there's nothing flashy about the way it looks it's kind of boxy in its design the keyboard deck is made of some sort of plastic but the bottom is aluminum the top is aluminum the color looks good and again this thing's not going to turn heads or make you think oh my gosh it's the best looking device I've ever seen it's like right at three pounds like 2.9 seven pounds or something like that 17 millimeters thick so not the thinnest thing in the world but overall it feels solid it feels good in the hand there's

no creak eNOS or a bendness to the whole device and it just feels like it's put together well and we'll know votes theone that pioneered the whole transforming device and 360 hinges so they've kind of got that nailed now so you get a nice you know amount of flex in the screen you know so it's easy to convert but it's not flopping all over

the place and there's enough substance here to make the thing feel you know just like a good Chromebook, it's really kind of hard to put into words exactly why I like the way this thing looks maybe it just kind of feels like home it's just comfortable feeling it looks fine it feels fine there's nothing about it that feels off-putting and there's nothing about it that's amazing it's just well built and well put together moving on to the screen again this is  a device that for $400 punches above its weight class a little bit it's a 1080p sixteen by nine thirteen points three inch full HD LCD panel and it looks good it's 300 nits in brightness as good viewing angles the colors are nice and punchy it's pretty much everything you could ask for in a Chromebook display and a lot of displays at this price category end up being a little bit more

washed out or they aren't quite as vibrant or they're dim and that's just

not the case with this setup next to something like the pixel will go for

instance it's almost hard to tell the difference between the two and we've

kind of held that screen up as one that we would say is good, not fantastic but good enough to not feel like you're missing out on anything and that's the case here this is a good display on a device that cost much less than other Chromebooks with much worse displays on them above the screen is a 720p webcam and while I wish that manufacturers would get away from this and at least get to 1080p webcam especially in the world we live in now where you know video chatting is much

more of a normal occurrence it's nice that they've put in a built-in privacy

the screen on this so with those you know smallish bezels around the screen there's enough room for this kind of manual slider that slides a

piece of plastic right over the webcam so for all of you out there that like to put a piece of tape over a post-it note or something like that over your webcam you can forget about having to do that anymore this isn't a software turn on turn off you can see the things lighting in front of it so no matter whether that camera is on or not you can slide this over and completely block your webcam and it's a nice little touch moving on down to the keyboard this was a huge surprise for me

Lenovo makes good keyboards and so                                                     

I wasn't worried that this wasn't gonna be a good keyboard I was just

shocked at how much I've liked this  keyboard even moving back from it to the pixel book go which I hold up is maybe the best keyboard I've ever typed on I think I prefer typing on this one and maybe it's just a little bit of additional key travel here that Lenovo has over something like the Samsung galaxy Chromebook or the pixel book go I don't know what it is but it's a combination of that extra key travel and maybe a little bit more clicking this in the keys but this thing feels great I don't make nearly as many mistakes as I make on any other keyboard and ultimately when it comes time to sit down and write at a thousand or 1500 word article I tend to want to pick this device up mainly because of its keyboard additionally with the Core i3 model this isn't true the Celeron models you actually, get back lighting on the keys - and again in a $400 Chromebook, these are some things you just don't expect

to have and it hasn't so it's just a nice touch that there's back lighting on

the keys as well beneath that great keyboard is a really good track pad I don't want to call it a great track pad because it's not glass I did find out Lenovo says it is made of Mylar so a plastic type of material but what I'll say for the track pad is it's generously spaced the click mechanism is

great it's set in very nice so it's not flopping around it doesn't move or shift under your fingers and the surface resists oils very very well matter of fact I would say it resists oils almost as well as a glass track-pad when we first got it out and unboxed it

I was a little concerned about it but the room we were in was super humid it was really muggy and my hands were clammy and all that kind of stuff since that day I don't think I've wiped off the track pad a single time and I've been using this thing full-time all-day at work at home and all that kind of stuff and it's just performed admirably for something that's not made of glass one other input method this device has that we can't exactly test right now as use pen input now you'll probably have this Chromebook for a long time so it's nice to know that it's there once you use pin to hit the market you can go choose which pin you'd like to use for whatever Chromebook you want but for right now the only one we have is a pre-production unit from HP and using it on different devices that support us eye pins it's not been great and we don't know if

that's because USI is not great or if it's because that pin is just not functioning correctly so until we get a production one in we're gonna hold off on any of our comments about how it

works just know this device will work with us stylus down the road, we're on the outside of the device you'll see a nice array of ports as well so we've got a USB type-c on both sides of it that

can handle data transfer video output charging all the normal things that USB type so you can do you've also still got a USB type a so for those legacy things those dongles and stuff you can kind of leave behind because you've got a USB type a port when you need it you also have a micro SD card slot to expand the storage inside a headphone microphone jack and a Kensington lock and obviously on the

side there are power and volume rocker buttons if you choose to

use this thing as a convertible and in tablet mode from time to time also it's worth noting this thing has upward firing speakers and while they're not the greatest speakers you've ever seen

it's nice to have forward-facing speakers because you'd have to worry

about whether the device is sitting in your lap or how you have it oriented the the sound is always kind of coming right up at your face and so it's a nice touch even though they're not the best speakers in the world its kind of nice to have inside the device that we have

here is the 10th gen Core i3 u series processor with 4 gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of internal storage, it's worth noting that there are four models of this device that is slated to become available in the coming months two of those are with the seller on your series processor one with four gigs of RAM 32 gigs of internal storage the other with four gigs of RAM 64 gigs of internal storage there's also going to be a much the higher-end version of this thing that's eventually going to become available with a core i5 u series processor 128  gigs of internal storage 8 gigs of ram and that storage is going to be nvme we don't know the pricing on that particular model yet and it's not available it's not even being listed just yet so we're not even really talking about it yet we'll probably make another video about that device when and if it comes out and shows up in the United States but for right now we're dealing with

three versions of this thing and by far and away the core i3 model is the one and I would easily tell everyone to go and look for and buy because ultimately the Celeron model that's all the way atthe bottom so the four gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of internal storage versus the core i3 with four gigs of ram and 64 gigs of storage Oh an additional back lighted keyboard only has a span of $50 in difference between the prices so it's very difficult for me to tell anyone to go and save 50 bucks lose your keyboard back lighting takes a much slower processor and lose internal storage where for $50 you can just upgrade to this one

and by the way, as we're making this video the i3 one's the only one that's available and that's good news because that's the one I would recommend that you go buy anyway because of this kind of price break, it's just not worth losing out on some of those features that this particular device has not surprisingly this thing moves along extremely fast I mean it's the same core i3 u series processor we saw in the Asus flip side 436 and you didn't expect an $800 Chromebook to be slow or sluggish it's fun to use you don't ever have to sit and think about whether or

not the device is going to respond when you need it to and not one time during In my testing process did I run into a situation where I thought man I could use more processing power I mean this thing's kind of a beast honestly it's also worth noting that this device like other newer Intel Chromebooks that are coming out this year is also equipped with Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 6 so many of you probably don't have access to a Wi-Fi 6 router yet but again just like everything else you will over the course of eight years the coffee shops you go into a lot of homes you go into your own home likely if you upgrade your router is going to have Wi-Fi 6 and that is going to be a benefit down the road because it's going to provide much faster data speeds much better performance in crowded spaces where there are tons of other devices trying to vie for that Wi-Fi data so you're going to enjoy that as time goes on and Bluetooth 5 is a much more stable connection with a much better Bluetooth stack that's going to behave much better than Chromebooks of the past that always had Bluetooth connection issues I've connected all kinds of things   with Bluetooth and didn't have any Bluetooth connection issues either.