While we rarely recommend a laptop with a screen below Full HD resolution, there are two ways to justify the rather lackluster screen quality of the IdeaPad 3. The first, obviously, is the price; TN panels are cheaper to procure, and Lenovo is able to pass on the savings to The second is battery life. With fewer pixels, the IdeaPad 3 showed tremendous endurance away from a power outlet, lasting about 17 hours in our battery rundown test. The dual-core, dual-threaded chip did affect performance and benchmark results, but we did not experience any painful stoppages or slowdowns during our tests. At least, it wasn’t until we launched half a dozen Chrome tabs and performed inline video playback, and it’s hard to complain about that. Android Geekbench 5 benchmark scores are also a bit higher than the Celeron N4000-based Chromebooks, but not as high as the faster Pentium and Core i3 models. Thus, the IdeaPad 3 feels a bit snappier than other rivals in daily browsing and general use. The keyboard is nothing to complain about. The gray keys look great against the Abyss’ color scheme and are comfortable to type on. There is ample travel on each key, and it is light enough that your hands won’t get tired from typing all day. The lack of backlighting is unfortunate, however, but not uncommon in this price range. The screen is a TN LCD panel, which is common on Chromebooks of this type. As with other models, it is easy to use, but not very impressive. When using apps in full-screen mode (as I tend to always do with Chromebooks), everything is clear and readable at the 1366 x 768 resolution, although the color tones are somewhat compromised.
