The $199 Lenovo Chromebook Duet sale is a great bang for buck deal
Originally priced at $299, you can now save money with a Lenovo Chromebook Duet sale for $199 at Best Buy thanks to a $100 discount on the 128 GB model. This deal includes the magnetic stand and keyboard accessories, but not a digital pen. However, you can add your own USI stylus for digital notes and drawing.
After reviewing the Lenovo Chromebook Duet back in June, I said it would make a fantastic secondary device. And at $199, the Lenovo Chromebook Duet sale fits the bill as a relatively inexpensive Chrome OS tablet for content consumption in the kitchen or bedroom. Even if that’s all you used it for, I think this is a good deal. Of course, you can use it for so much more, even as a primary Chromebook in certain use cases.
It’s great for laptop browsing, running Android apps, and watching online or locally stored media.
Part of the reason for that is because the Octa-core MediaTek processor offers good bang for buck performance, even with 4 GB of memory, which I consider the bare minimum these days. It doesn’t hurt that the 10.1-inch display is a high-quality 1920 x 1080 panel with an above-average 400 nits of brightness. And the fact that you get both the Duet cover/stand and detachable keyboard is a plus.
If I were planning to make this Chrome OS tablet a daily, all-day device, I’d personally pipe the output to a external monitor though. Staring at a 10.1-inch display for 8 or more hours would cause my four eyes to bug out. External display support is easily achieved with a proper USB-C cable for video out. Just bear in mind that the Duet only supports 1080p at 24fps on a monitor.
This model on sale is the higher configuration of the Lenovo Duet Chromebook, meaning it has one and only one boost over the base model: Double the local storage. The base model comes with 64 GB of storage while this configuration offers 128 GB.
Essentially, with the sale you’re getting the higher storage capacity model for the $20 less than the MSRP of the base price.
Here’s a rundown of the full specs, which are the exact same as the model I reviewed:
| CPU | Octa-core Mediatek Helio P60T (4xA73 at 2.0GHz) |
| GPU | ARM G72 MP3 |
| Display | 10.1-inch 1920 x 1200 touchscreen, 400-nits, 70% color gamut |
| Memory | 4 GB LPDDR4x |
| Storage | Up to 128 GB eMMC |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 4.2 |
| Input | Included keyboard with trackpad, optional stylus, 2 MP front camera, 8 MP webcam |
| Ports | One USB Type-C (2.0 + DisplayPort) |
| Battery | 7180 mAh, expected run-time of 10 hours for video, 8 hours for web browsing |
| Weight | 0.99 pounds without keyboard |
| Software | Chrome OS automatic updates through June 2028 |
What’s weird … I can’t find the 64 GB model anywhere (retail anyway … it is going for $319 on the Lenovo site where this model is also priced at $339).
I guess the shelf life on Chromebooks isn’t very long because of the 7 year support window. So they are probably clearing retail inventory channels on these things for the next batch which will probably arrive in time for the Christmas shopping season.
Off topic but it looks like AMD and MediaTek are joining forces to design SOCs for notebooks. (Which is strange because previously AMD and Nvidia were holding talks, as AMD’s partner was supposed to be Samsung.)
This would mean MediaTek SOCs with ARM RDNA graphics. It would also mean Ryzen CPUs with MediaTek 5G radios. Naturally, both would be compelling for Chromebooks that we could potentially see in 2022-2023.
https://hothardware.com/news/amd-reportedly-eyes-mediatek-partnership-to-add-5g-to-ryzen-socs
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mediatek-join-venture
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-and-MediaTek-rumored-to-form-joint-venture-focusing-on-notebook-SoCs.564942.0.html
Of course a limiter on this will be the chip shortage, as both MediaTek and AMD are wedded at the hip to Taiwan Semiconductor. Then again, Samsung’s infamous yield problems are why we have yet to see an Exynos 2200 with the AMD GPU device in the wild. This thing was announced in January 2021 and was SUPPOSED to launch this summer in a Windows 10 ARM laptop and also in some versions of the Galaxy Fold 3. Now it appears that we won’t see this AMD GPU until January 2022, and in a regular smartphone – the Galaxy S22 – instead of a device more capable of showing off its potential. AMD is not pleased and is looking at other potential licensees for the mobile GPU.
Bought this when Best Buy had it for 229 last year. My experience: multiple crashes in a day; freezing for minutes at a time; and slow at times. Updates have only reduced the amount of freezing. Right now, I only use the tablet for a coloring app (which still crashes far too often), nothing in a browser.
Having heard such glowing reviews of this device, I’m sorely disappointed. And jealous. And very frustrated. This Duet and my experience with a Lenovo PC have definitely put me off Lenovo.
The Lenovo Duet that I purchased for a relative last year works great. I hear the same from a lot of people … that it is a very good device whose only flaw is the combination 4 GB RAM and underpowered SOC.
No matter what the price, it still has the original buggy comm chip that causes daily random wifi disconnects that has STILL never been fixed. Plus a whole host of other random quirks that cause spontaneous reboots. The latest annoyance is a non-responsive onscreen keyboard, weird auto correct artifacts with or without the physical keyboard, and a still unresolved and apparently unaddressed Cut/Copy/Paste bug that causes spontaneous reboots. My kid has a lower end Chromebook that runs circles around the Duet, that sold for this “new” discounted price. Why are they clearing out the inventory? Because newer models are coming out. Sadly, with Lenovo’s poor track record with software/hardware problems on their tablets and the Moto line, there’s no guarantee that these new devices won’t be just as buggy as their predecessors.
Seriously, even at this price, this device is at best apossible alternative to those considering the purchase of an Amazon Fire tablet.
Good for media content consumption and *some* lightweight Android gaming.
About the only real nice thing about it is the ChromeOS option to tether to your Android phone.
Certainly NOT worth the original full list price that early adopters shelled out for it when media pundits were singing it’s praises in a chorus of disinformation, and subsequent silence on it’s many (still unresolved) bugs, glitches, and shortcomings.