Lenovo Group Ltd. (HKSE: 0992) (LNVGY)

[revlis]

Hands-on with the Lenovo N20p touchscreen Chromebook

The Lenovo N20 is an 11.6 inch Chrome OS laptop that’ll sell for $279 and up when it goes on sale this summer (probably by August). Cheap, portable Chromebooks are a dime a dozen these days… but Lenovo’s got another trick up its sleeve.

The company will also launch the Lenovo N20p Chromebook with a touchscreen display that folds back 300 degrees for use in presentation or kiosk mode. It’ll be available by August for $329 and up.

lenovo n20p_09

Lenovo also has a ThinkPad line of Chrome OS (and Windows) laptops with rugged cases and optional Yoga designs which allow you to push the screen back 360 degrees until the laptop becomes a notebook.

The N20 series notebooks aren’t as rugged or flexible, but they’re cheaper.

Lenovo introduced these laptops in May, and I recently got a chance to play with one for a few minutes. The notebook feels pretty light, looks pretty thin, and should get up to 8 hours of battery life, making it a decent choice for a portable notebook… as long as you don’t need a lot of storage space or the ability to run Windows apps.

The entry-level models will have just 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, and they run Google’s browser-based operating system.

lenovo n20p_04

While Chrome OS is designed first and foremost for laptop and desktop computers, Google’s been making it more and more touch friendly over the past year or two, and I had no problem tapping the app launcher, minimize button, or other on-screen elements with my fingers.

Unfortunately the Lenovo N20p has limited viewing angles. While the 1366 x 768 pixel display looks decent when viewed from the front, from certain angles the colors wash out and disappear until it you’re practically staring at a black screen. That’s kind of disappointing for a laptop which has a screen that rotates to 300 degrees… although I suppose the wide range of rotation means it shouldn’t be hard to find an angle that works for you.

Other features include an SD card reader, 2 USB ports, 802.11ac WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.0.

http://liliputing.com/2014/06/hands-lenovo-n20p-touchscreen-chromebook.html