Lenovo has a new budget-friendly Chrome OS 2-in-1 set to become available in November for just $279.99 – or €349 in the EMEA market – and unveiled at this year’s IFA 2018 consumer electronics conference. Dubbed the Lenovo C330 Chromebook, the new hardware will ship with and an 11.6-inch form factor with a 1366 x 768 HD touch display set on a 360-degree single-piece hinge. That’s embedded in a frame that measures 292 x 215.39 x 19.6mm, with the new laptop-like tipping the scales at 2.6lbs for easy portability. A combination 1-megapixel 720P HD camera and single microphone reside just above the screen. Although not great, at least on paper, that should be suitable for most tasks undertaken by the average user.
On the connectivity front, Lenovo’s 2-in-1 features support for Wireless 802.11ac 2 x 2 and Bluetooth 4.1. A single USB 3.0 and one USB-C port are part of the build and positioned along the left-hand edge next to a full-sized HDMI output port. There’s an SD card reader as well to allow storage expansion in case space starts running low due to an excess of media or Android apps. On the other side, a 3.5mm headphone jack appears next to the volume rocker and power button commonly found on convertible laptops. Audio output, on the other hand, is accommodated by dual-array Dolby-powered speakers. That means Lenovo’s budget convertible should sound exceptional compared to many other Chrome OS devices in its price range. What’s more, the Lenovo C330 Chromebook will be available in either ‘Blizzard White’ or ‘Champaign,’ giving customers at least a couple of options to express their style.
Lenovo didn’t cut corners too much when it comes to internal specifications either. Processing tasks are handled by a reasonable quad-core MediaTek 8173C SoC with integrated graphics. That’s clocked at 2.10 GHz with 4G of LPDDR3 RAM in order to ensure that any lag is kept to a bare minimum. As to the storage side of the equation, there will effectively be two variants of the Lenovo C330 Chromebook available. The more affordable of those will ship with a not-insignificant 32GB of space. A slightly more expensive model will also be available with double the capacity at 64GB. The battery behind all of that hardware has a claimed life of around 10-hours.
