When last year’s Duet cost £300, however, you may wonder where all your money is going – and the obvious answer is the display. At those prices, there’s little reason to choose the cheaper option. However, it is bundled with the £550 version, and that has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of eMMC storage. The magnetised backplate on the Duet 5 includes a small cutaway for a Lenovo Active Pen stylus to clip to the back, but note that the stylus doesn’t come with the £500 model, which includes 4GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage. A pullable tab or lanyard could easily fix this deficiency, or you can pick up Microsoft’s Surface Adaptive Kit as this will work with any device, not just the Surface Pro 8.

It’s size alone that gives this keyboard appeal.Īnother criticism laid at the door of last year’s Duet Chromebook – that the magnetic kickstand could be a pain to extend at times – still remains. Finally, note that the keys on the Duet 5 Chromebook keyboard aren’t backlit. Nor does it compare well to laptops for the feel of the keys, with a flat action that lacks travel. It’s far better on a flat surface, where you don’t notice the flimsiness of the design. Both are equally slim, measuring just over 7mm thick, but this means that things have flipped: the Duet was better as a tablet, the Duet 5 is better as a laptop.Īs ever with this form of design, you shouldn’t expect a perfect on-the-knees typing experience. That’s in part due to its 700g weight (1kg with the keyboard), which is 250g more than the Duet. The flipside? At this size, and with a 16:9 screen ratio, the Duet 5 is unwieldy as a tablet. With a 13.3in screen to press up against, the Duet 5 Chromebook’s keyboard is much more like those found on ultraportables.

This rules it out for people who don’t have much dexterity in their hands or don’t want to type with hunched-up claws. The original Duet Chromebook featured a 10.1in display, which inevitably meant that its detachable keyboard also measured around 10in diagonally. Let’s start with the obvious change: it’s bigger.

Stylus for lenovo ideapad duet