Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 (2022) Laptop Review

The Lenovo Duet 3 has a simple design that looks almost identical to its predecessor, the Lenovo Chromebook Duet (2020). It's a tablet with a two-tone back, relatively thin bezels, and speakers on each side (in landscape mode). In addition to the front-facing camera, there's an 8MP camera on the back. The fabric-covered back cover and the keyboard attach to the tablet magnetically. There's a pen holder on the back cover; you can remove it if you don't need it, but it'll leave a gap, and it might be hard to put it back on. It's available in two color schemes: Storm Gray and Misty Blue.

The build quality is decent. The construction is a mix of aluminum and plastic, with a finish that doesn't scratch or pick up fingerprints easily. The tablet feels solid and doesn't flex at all, but the keyboard feels more flimsy and flexes a bit.

The kickstand's hinge is adequate. It feels a little cheap but still very sturdy. Like most 2-in-1 tablets, you can tilt the screen to an almost flat position to take notes or draw with a stylus. The posted range is the maximum angle you can tilt the screen, not the actual range because the tablet would fall shut if you set it at less than 90 degrees.

The Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 and its power adapter are very compact and lightweight. The posted measurements include the back cover and the keyboard. The pen holder on the back adds 0.47 inches (1.2cm) of thickness and 10g of weight.

The Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 isn't serviceable. It's very hard to access the internals without causing damage, as the tablet is mostly held together with glue. None of the components are user-replaceable anyway.

• Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 laptop
• Back cover
• Keyboard
• 30W USB-C power adapter and cord
• User guide

The Lenovo Duet 3's display resolution isn't particularly high, as it's just a little more than FHD (1920 x 1080), but it looks very sharp because its small screen size makes the pixel density very high. Split-screen multitasking is doable; however, it feels pretty cramped, so it isn't the best experience. Its 5:3 aspect ratio is slightly wider but shorter than 16:10.

The Lenovo Duet 3 is only available with a 60Hz screen. It has a very slow response time causing noticeable ghosting, so it isn't ideal for viewing fast-moving content or gaming.

The display's contrast ratio is decent and within the typical range for IPS panels. However, it's still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings.

The display gets bright enough for use in most indoor settings. It's just enough for outdoors in broad daylight; however, you may have trouble seeing some content due to the display's glossy finish, especially dark-color content. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness settings, which is great for dark room viewing as it causes less eye strain.

The reflection handling is okay. The display's glossy finish mainly struggles with direct, mirror-like reflections, meaning it's best to avoid having bright light sources directly behind you, as the reflections are visible even with the screen at maximum brightness.

The black uniformity is decent. The screen is more blue than gray or black, and there's a bit of clouding near the corners and edges.

The horizontal viewing angle is passable. Image accuracy degrades fairly quickly as you move off-center, so you need to be near or directly in front of the screen to see an accurate image.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. Like the horizontal viewing angle, the image looks dimmer and more washed out from above and below. You need to look at the screen straight on to see an accurate image.

The display's accuracy is bad out of the box. Most colors are inaccurate, and the white balance is visibly off, especially at higher brightness levels. The color temperature is much cooler than the standard 6500K target, giving the image a noticeable blueish tint. The gamma sticks to an almost flat 2.2 instead of following the sRGB curve, making bright scenes too bright and dark scenes too dark.

The Lenovo Duet 3's display has a great color gamut. It has near-full sRGB coverage, the color space used in most content. It also has very good coverage of the wider color spaces, like Adobe RGB and DCI P3, but it isn't enough for photo editing or viewing and producing HDR content.

The backlight is entirely flicker-free, which helps reduce eye strain.

The Lenovo Duet 3's keyboard is inadequate. Although the layout is easy to get used to, it feels very cramped because it's such a compact device. It also feels flimsy, and unlike the Microsoft Surface Pro 8 (2021) and Microsoft Surface Go 3 (2021), there's no way to tilt it to improve comfort. The keys are stable and have a lot of travel; however, they don't feel particularly satisfying to type on and require a lot of force to actuate, so it can be tiring to type on for extended periods. Typing noise is relatively low and isn't bothersome in quiet settings.

The touchpad is inadequate. It's small and doesn't track well, especially around the edges. Palm rejection doesn't always work, and gestures like zooming in and out of images and maps can feel a little janky. Dragging and dropping items is also hard. You can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad, and the click mechanism doesn't feel very satisfying. On the upside, its smooth surface allows the fingers to glide easily.

The speakers are bad. They don't get very loud and sound unnatural, with no bass. Also, they fire from the side, so your hands might cover them when holding the tablet in landscape mode.

The Lenovo Duet 3 has a good webcam. There's a lot of fine detail, and the colors look natural; it's just a tad overexposed. As for the microphone, voices sound clear but slightly muffled, and there's a little bit of background noise. There's a second 8MP camera on the back of the device; you can see the image quality in this video.

The Lenovo Duet 3 has a bad port selection. The USB-C ports support USB 3.2 Gen. 1 data transfer speed of up to 5Gbps. The device charges over USB-C, so unless you use a dock, you only have one usable port when plugged in. There's no 3.5mm headphone jack, and the device doesn't have a USB-C audio adapter.

The Lenovo Duet 3 uses a Qualcomm wireless adapter. Unfortunately, we can't confirm the exact model.

The Lenovo Duet 3 is only available with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen. 2 SoC (System on Chip), a low-power ARM-based processor typically found in budget Chromebooks. It's fast enough to provide a relatively smooth desktop experience on Chrome OS; however, it can't handle demanding workloads, so it's mainly for tasks like web browsing, text processing, and video playback.

The Lenovo Duet 3 is only available with integrated graphics. Again, it's a low-power GPU that can only handle general productivity tasks, not intensive workloads like video editing. Most games from the Google Play Store will run well, but you might experience some stutters in very graphically-demanding titles.

You can get this laptop with 4GB or 8GB of memory.

This laptop is only available with 64GB or 128GB of eMMC storage.

The Lenovo Duet 3's overall score in Geekbench 5 is very low. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen.2 SoC can only handle light tasks like web browsing, video playback, and text processing. If you need to run more intensive applications or perform heavy multitasking, it's best to get a laptop with a more powerful U- or P-series CPU, like the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (2022). Although the GPU compute test doesn't work on Chrome OS, the integrated GPU likely performs poorly, so it isn't suitable for any demanding computing tasks.

Cinebench R23 doesn't run on Chrome OS. The performance is likely very bad, as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen. 2 is a low-end processor. It's also in a device with no active cooling, so there's probably some thermal throttling when performing heavy, sustained workloads.

The Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 performs terribly in Blender. It takes a very long time to render the simple bmw27 scene, far too slow for any practical purposes. Blender doesn't support the integrated GPU, although it'll likely take even longer.

The Basemark GPU score is terrible. The Qualcomm Adreno 618 can only handle mobile Android games from the Google Play Store, and even then, you might experience some stutters in very graphically-intensive titles.

The eMMC drive performs poorly. It's slow to retrieve data, launch a locally-installed app, and write data to the drive. That said, the system still feels reasonably responsive because Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system, and most tasks are done online through the Chrome browser.

The Lenovo Duet 3's battery life is excellent. Despite its small battery capacity, it easily lasts a full day of light tasks. Video playback drains the battery much faster, giving you only enough time to get through a movie or two. Battery life while gaming is short but far better than most gaming laptops with a dedicated GPU.

Borderlands 3 doesn't run on Chrome OS.

Civilization VI doesn't run on Chrome OS.

CS:GO doesn't run on Chrome OS.

Shadow of the Tome Raider doesn't run on Chrome OS.

The Lenovo Duet 3 has outstanding thermal and noise handling. The heat doesn't affect the keyboard since all the components are on the tablet side, and it isn't a problem when using the device in tablet mode either, as there's a back cover. There's no fan noise because this is a fanless device.

We can't test the performance over time because UNIGINE Heaven and Cinebench R23 aren't compatible with Chrome OS. There's likely some thermal throttling, which is typical for a fanless device. The performance loss isn't noticeable if you only perform light tasks like web browsing and video playback; it's only noticeable when you push the system to near-maximum capacity, like when gaming.

There aren't any pre-installed applications other than those that typically come with Chrome OS.

Every Chromebook has an 'expiration date' at which it stops receiving software updates, and according to Google's official document, the Duet 3's end-of-life is June 2030. Google may extend this date as they have for other Chromebooks; it's best to check their official document for any changes.

The Lenovo Duet 3 supports pen input; however, not all models have a stylus (Lenovo USI Pen 2), so you may have to buy it separately. Any USI (Universal Stylus Initiative) stylus will work, but it might not fit the pen holder on the back cover.