Lenovo S330 Chromebook First Impressions

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

This will be a first impressions of my new laptop, the Lenovo S330. 

I bought this laptop used a few hours ago, and i've just been doing general things and setting it up, so i have a few things i already want to comment on. 

 

Something to keep in mind is that i bought this laptop for €75, which is crazy. 

 

So, why did i buy this device. simple, i was curious about ChromeOS, i've used it before but that was on a laptop much worse than this one. the second reason is that i saw it for this price. all the other laptops i have are old and need new batteries, and those batteries cost more than half what i paid for this chromebook which is insane. so i can now sell all my other laptops and use this as my only laptop. 

 

now, i will still use a Windows pc for daily use. this is just a machine for simple on the road tasks. 

 

 

Build Quality

This laptop feel svery solid for what it is. it's plastic, but ie sued Windows laptops, even from Lenovo, that cost twice as much as this cost when it was new and that felt waaaaaay worse to use. 

 

The keyboard is very nice, there is a lot of travel and i've always loved the layout of chromebooks. my only complaint is that it's not backlit but like, you need to adjust your expectations a bit when using hardware this cheap. 

And the trackpad isn't bad either. it's not great, but i've used a lot worse. it feels smooth, the gestures work well and it has a nice click. 

 

 

Display

mine has a 14" 1080p screen, although it's also available with a 768p screen i believe. the 1080p display on mine is good. the colors and especially black levels aren't great, like this is a cheap display. however the viewing angles are decent and 1080p at this size looks great to me, but i have bad eyes so keep that in mind. 

 

 

Performance

Now things get interesting. My chromebook is ARM based. something that Apple is rumored to move to and Microsoft has failed at multiple times. but google has made a good experience on ARM already. my specific chip is a Mediatek MT8173. it feels snappy. even writing this review and having a youtube video play picture-in-picture it still opens apps quickly and doesn't stutter or anything like that. 

 

 

ChromeOS

This is the dealbreaker with chromebooks for a lot of people and i get it. for me, it's fine. it does everything i need and it's much lighter than Windows. i can log in to it without putting in a password with my android phone, it updates in 20 seconds (i already got an update because i'm using the unstable version of ChromeOS to get some new features early). 

It supports Android apps which is really cool and i wish i had it on Windows. no longer do i need to load a whole website ridden with ads to check the weather. i can just open my preferred weather app. 

And you can even install Linux apps!!! with a few gotcha's though. there is no support for audio or gpu acceleration for those apps, but that's fine. i use the feature to run Libreoffice and Gimp, and for that it works amazingly. 

 

 

Battery Life

The battery life on this laptop is insane. writing this review with a youtube video playing picture-in-picture which i've been doing for about 20 minutes it's still at 100% and it's reporting 9 hours and 49 minutes remaining which is just holy crap. that's the advantage of using ARM in a laptop, the battery life is insane. 

 

 

That's it for now. i'll make another review after using this around the house for about a week. 

Edited May 7, 2020 by Twilight
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