Great for travel, everyday tasksArvosana 5/5
TLDR: For the price, good performance, great battery life and display brightness. Upgrade SSD and keep Win10 instead of Win11, it will run turbo!
Price:
As far as I see, the next better compact with swivel screen, starts at 1500 EUR. The initial price was perfect at 199 EUR, so I'm nocking off the star because it's now 299 EUR, and the "intel inside" is really old (with a new name). New laptops (unlike outlet) can be bundled with verkkis 3 year additional warranty, so buying a new one makes more sense in the long run (manufacturer only gives 12 months).
Build:
Weight, appearance, this is subjective - check it out in person. For travel, for airplane/train seat tray, perfect - just flip it on the back and adjust angle accordingly. Hard plastic and rugged construct - I'd rather not test its limits but it seems it will last. It doesn't seem to need a protective case.
Fanless design, meaning the heat from the processor goes to the back, but it never ran too hot. It also means zero noise.
Keyboard is the iconic ThinkPad design without the 'pointing stick' in the middle, but the feel is on the cheaper side (reminds of mini Bluetooth keyboards for TV). Good for typing, not very loud, and keys spaced quite well, but I'm knocking off a star of the 'product quality'.
Touch screen feels smooth and responds well. Thick bezels make it easier to hold while in tablet mode. I was disappointed by the missing pen - currently priced at an unreasonable 99 EUR (one third of the laptop price!), but according to the Lenovo website a pencil can also be used. Display is really bright and even though it's 'only' HD-ready, it feels like full HD due to its 11" size. The characters don't look small, but I did increase the size of the mouse pointer.
Performance:
The Core m3-8100Y is quite good in spite of having only 2 cores. Online benchmarks puts it side by side even with i5, and everything feels generally smooth.
RAM fixed at 8 GB - perfectly fine for Win/Office/Browsing, and the only laptop in the price range that has that much RAM. What is really surprising, the much more expensive laptops also have only 8 GB (also soldered).
Windows 10 Pro education edition has all the features, also suitable for joining a work domain. My advice is to keep Win10 and not to upgrade to Win11, because it will "eat" a whole 1GB of RAM more for absolutely no reason (2.7 GB RAM with Win10 vs. 3.7 GB RAM with Win11).
The SSD is average, but gets the job done with some waiting time. I upgraded to WD Black SN770M 1TB (verkkis product code: 906691), disabled search indexing, removed all optional features and apps, disabled transparency in start menu, and disabled all startup programs. This made the laptop so much faster and premium!
(I'm knocking off another 'value for money' star, because SSD costs almost half the laptop)
Music:
Audio seems fine on a table, but in the lap it can get 'muffled'. Great audio tech in any case, considering there are no visible speakers. Laptop has bluetooth and an audio out, so both wireless and wired listening options are available. Spotify has a native win10 app that also supports offline listening and downloading. It doesn't occupy a lot of RAM, and runs well.
Gaming:
It can be done :) For Steam, lookup "low bandwith mode" or "lite mode". Classic games of the 90s/early 00s run perfectly fine (back then, this laptop would have been a supercomputer). Newer, lightweight timewasters, like "Mini Metro" or "Lyne", also work perfectly fine.
Optional accessories:
Logitech Pebble 2 M350s compact size and flat design fits in the backpack nicely
vk84