01 April 2026

Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14" OLED Review

My 2020 HP Chromebook X360 14c was annoying me with the following behaviors:

  • the trackpad would like to get stuck in a clicked state
  • the fan would spin up at random times and be quite noisy
  • chrome would lag doing some simple tasks like opening an email in gmail
This meant I was in the market for a new laptop.


Use Case

I mainly use the laptop for browsing the web, light gaming (eg. Minecraft), and VNCing into my server. I will also occasionally stream games from my desktop.


Criteria

Current Laptop specs

  • HP Chromebook 14C-CA0053DX
  • i3-10110U 2 cores and 4 threads
  • 8 GiB of memory
  • 14" 16:9 aspect ratio screen

Requirements

  • USB-C on either side for easy charging
  • Backlit keyboard
  • 14" 16:10 aspect ratio screen
  • at least 16 GiB of RAM
Preferred
  • No fan noise
  • 2-in-1 (for versatility)
  • Touchscreen
  • Long battery life


Top Choices

I chose the first one as it felt like the best fit for my requirements.


First Impressions

Packaging was superb and felt premium

  • Came wrapped in brown shrink wrap
  • The outside box was a standard brown box with the laptop specs on the side
  • Inside contained the charger in a brown box and a second shrink wrapped box containing the laptop suspended in the middle by cardboard packing spacers
  • The inside box contained the laptop inside a cloth feeling bag
  • Opening the laptop there was a pamphlet and cloth screen protector inside

Looks

  • The seashell color is a tasteful mix of gold and silver
  • Minimal logos on the cover
    • A centered reflective "Lenovo" logo
    • A printed "chromebook plus" on the top left

In hand feel

  • Laptop is lighter (2.75 vs 3.64 pounds) and thinner (0.62 vs 0.7 inches) than my previous, likely due to not being a 2-in-1
  • It is slightly deeper (8.63 vs 8.11 inches) and slightly less wide (12.37 vs 12.6 inches) than my previous
  • Top is metal and feels very rigid
  • Bottom while plastic also feels rigid and the waves on the bottom help make the laptop feel like it has more grip when carrying closed
  • Keyboard has a little bit of deck flex, but I don't notice it during normal usage
  • Originally the hinge was too tight to open the laptop with one-hand, but it is slowly getting better


Setup and Initial thoughts

Setup was fairly smooth

  • I had to plug the laptop in before it would turn on
  • Connected to WiFi
  • Updated the laptop
  • Logged in to Google account
  • Answered the simple setup questions

General Usage

  • Resumes from sleep before the screen is all the way open
  • Fingerprint reader works fast
  • Keyboard feels great to type on
  • Screen is nice and bright for indoor usage and I don't see any screen door effect unless I put my face inches from the screen
    • Side Note: I hate that they call 1920x1200 a 2K screen
  • Battery life is appearing to be excellent as right now it is at 57% and predicting between 7-9 hours (with screen at about 40%)
  • Minecraft plays well, but I can't get a FPS number


Other

Testing

  • ChromeOS built-in CPU test
    • CPU throttles quickly, but remains at 2.3 GHz even at nearly 100 C
    • During the test the UI does become laggy
    • After the test is complete the CPU temp drops quickly
  • Geekbench 6
    • Geekbench 6.6.0 for Android AArch64
    • For some reason the fastest core was disabled on my first set of runs
      • Single-Core scores: 1023, 1027, 1109, 1155
      • Multi-Core scores: 6536, 6482, 6500, 6467
    • After rebooting, the cores were properly detected
      • Single-Core scores: 2541, 2540, 2527
      • Multi-Cores scores: 7789, 7890, 7846
    • For reference, the Core i3-10110U
      • Single-Core scores: 1151, 1093, 1201
      • Multi-Core scores: 2011, 2049, 2071


Appendix

Sources



Posted by at
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)