hey everybody its Lawnside but we’re taking a look today at a new Chromebook from Lenovo this is their si 330 and this is an all-in-one Chromebook meaning you can jump it around here into display mode or put it up on your desk in tent mode or use it like a rather large tablet so it’s got a touchscreen onboard but it is running Chrome OS and we’re going to explore more about what you can do with this device in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this is on loan from Lenovo so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this Chromebook is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this is the two-in-one that starts at 279 dollars they have a laptop version with the same specifications but without the wraparound screen that sells for 249 dollars so if you don’t need the two-in-one 250 bucks we’ll get you the same machine you get four gigs of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage for that price both devices have a mediatek 8 1 7 3 C processor built in that is an ARM based processor that we last saw on an Acer Chromebook about 8 months ago maybe a year ago now very nicely performing chip actually especially compared to some of the Intel chips we typically see on these devices and we’ll look at how this one stacks up with the Acer Chromebook 11 which is very similar to this and like that Acer Chromebook 11 this one has an IPS display which is something we don’t always see at this price point so it’s nice and bright and very crisp with very good viewing angles and of course this one being the two-in-one you also get some touch functionality with it too and Chrome OS has been getting friendlier and friendlier for touch input as they continue developing it so that was nice to see on here really nice display for the price point it weighs 2.6 pounds or 1.2 kilograms so not all that heavy the battery life on this one will probably get you anywhere from 8 to 10
hours depending on what you’re doing with it more on the 10-hour side if you are doing basic web browser an email with the display brightness turned down but if you’re taxing it harder with Android apps and that sort of thing you’ll probably be looking at more around 8 hours of overall battery life has a pretty decent wireless radio built in also at 802 11 AC 2 by 2 radio along with Bluetooth 4.1 the keyboard and trackpad are very usable on this like they are on most Google Chromebooks nice keyboard spacing here not backlit but it does have decent travel to it very very comfortable to type on it didn’t really have to get used to it at all it was a very quick transition there the trackpad here which is very white as you can see does function very well and very responsive like I have seen on many other Chromebooks there’s a very consistent keyboard experience because I think Google tells the manufacturers how to put these keyboards together so it really feels very similar to other Chromebooks you may have used and overall a very nice experience there are some ports on this one of course and the most notable one is the USB type-c port here this port will charge the laptop but will also allow for data and video so I was able to plug in a single cable here to a docking station we have over there we’re able to get the unit here to output to a 1440p monitor at 60 Hertz so that was good I also plugged it into a 4k monitor it was able to do 4k with a display port adapter but only at 30 frames per second but nonetheless to be able to get that kind of display
output with a single cable on a cheap laptop was a pretty good thing so that was a nice surprise on there and there’s also a full size HDMI port here on the side so you can just plug in a monitor the old-fashioned way if you want but just know that in my testing it would only allow one or the other so there’s no dual display output on this but if you are outputting to a second display the laptops internal display will work as well you have a USB port here for plugging in keyboards and mice and that sort of thing but you only get one full size USB port but you could always get an adapter here for the USB type-c to give yourself a few extra ports if you need it over here is a full-size SD card slot as you can see though it will stick out of there quite a bit so this is not a solution for an alternative storage medium for your laptop unfortunately so if you do need storage you might want to go with the 64 gigabyte version that costs a little bit more on the other side you’ve got a Kensington lock slot here for locking it down on your desk your power button is here volume rocker and a headphone microphone jack over there for plugging in external audio so let’s take a look now and see how it performs you’ll see right now it is in laptop mode but if I just flip the screen around like so it will move into tablet mode where every window becomes a full screen window so as I switch around between the different things I’m looking at you can see how that works and what I’m going to do here is this pull up the on-screen keyboard and one of the cool things they have on the Chrome OS now for the tablet mode is you can actually use your handwriting or a finger in this case to write out things that you would normally type ins we’re just going to go and visit nasa.gov you’ll see the display here is jumping around quite a bit that’s one of the things that you
run into with lower-cost laptops that you will have a little bit of display bounce here when you’re in either laptop or tablet mode but you can see though how quickly things load up this is doing parts of the fact that we are running on AC wireless so we get a fast connection to the internet through that capability there and also because the processor in here is actually pretty quick for an ARM based chip things are really snappy and responsive as you can see here I will also take a look at my youtube channel we’ve got a 60 frames per second video that we’ll check out here in a second and see how well it can playback some higher-end video that you might stream across the web so here we’ve got that video running at 60 frames per second 1080p and we’re getting a couple of dropped frames here and there as it’s playing through it’s about a 12-minute video I think we’re about halfway through it at this point and we’ve had about 40 dropped frames or so typically we’re seeing them when we are transitioning in between scenes so it will struggle slightly on some of the higher-end video you’d probably see similar drop-offs on 4k files if you’re playing them back but generally I think it should it should be a pretty good web browsing experience it is a pretty quick and responsive processor and noticeably faster than some of the low-end Intel chips that we sometimes see in Chromebooks at this price point so I think you be quite pleased with its overall performance with its 8 to 10 hours of battery life as well we also ran the browser bench org speedometer test and there we got a score of 47 point 5 which lines up exactly with the Chromebook r-13 we looked at
about a year ago with the same processor and you can also see the version 2.0 of that test came in about the same but take a look at the Acer Chromebook 11 we reviewed a little earlier this year that has an Intel chip at around this price point you’ll see that it doesn’t do as well that arm processor in here just a better performing chip for this kind of activity and it’s really a matter of what they tune these chips to do and for a Chromebook this mediatek chip is actually not bad for an entry-level device and outperforms the entry-level Intel chip that we have tested in Prior reviews now like most Chromebooks shipping today this will support the Google Play Store so if you have Android apps that you bought on your phone you can run them on your Chromebook and a lot of the casual games here do run pretty nicely we’ve got Crossy road running here and the framerate looks pretty good on it and you can enjoy a lot of the games that you’re already playing on your phone with a much larger screen we’re seeing it getting better and better each time they update the operating system there are some issues still related to window sizing and that sort of thing but generally it’s gotten a lot better than it was last year and I think
you’ll have a pretty good experience running all of the Android apps that you might already be running on a phone or tablet and because it can run Android apps it can also run Android video game emulators and I think the sweet spot for this one is probably the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 1 on backwards so the 90s 80s and 70s should all be represented here on the device the n64 emulator here is reporting only about 20 frames per second this is Moop n64 but in playing it actually feels a little smoother than that so I think you’re gonna get a decent ps1 and n64 experiences here along with some of the older game consoles as well it’s a nice little add-on to be able to play some of that old stuff on one of these Chromebooks they’ve certainly gotten a lot more usable over the last couple of years now the one thing you won’t be able to do on this Chromebook is run Linux applications there is a new Chrome OS feature that allows you to run Linux apps alongside all of your chrome and Android stuff but at the moment this particular laptop and others powered with its processor are not compatible so if you were looking for a cheap way to run those Linux applications at least for now this one is not it and I don’t believe this processor is going to be on the roadmap in the future either so you can do Android and Chrome OS but no Linux on here but for the price point I don’t think it’s too bad of a device here it’s definitely not the most attractive thing in the world you got an enormous bezel here at the bottom of the screen but I like the fact that
they’re incorporating an IPS display at this price point which is always good to see on a low-cost device I love the fact that they’ve got a fully functional USB type-c port on it and as we found with prior reviews the mediatek processor is really well suited for web browsing and Android applications and generally most of what you throw at this thing should work just fine I was hoping to run the 3dmark benchmark that we run on all of our Android devices but we couldn’t get it to work on here unfortunately so I don’t have a way of stacking it up against mobile phones and whatnot but generally most of the casual games you play should be fine most of the Android apps you will run on it should also be fine along with all of the web browsing you might do on it as well and you get a pretty usable touchscreen here it’s a little clunky as a tablet but you can use it as one if you choose and overall it’s a nice device here with a pretty functional set of features that doesn’t cost all that much money until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold-level supporters Chris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht too much sauce gerard Newberg in Kalyan Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe visit LAN TV
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