Lenovo has a new Chrome OS laptop on the way. The Lenovo N21 Chromebook has a rugged case, an 11.6 inch display, and an Intel Celeron N2840 Bay Trail processor.
It’s aimed at the education market, although the model number suggests the Lenovo N21 could also be a replacement for last year’s consumer-oriented Lenovo N20 Chromebook. There’s no word on whether there’s a new model set to replace the N20p touchscreen model.
The Lenovo N21 supports 2GB to 4GB of RAM, features 16GB of solid state storage, and has a 1MP rotatable camera.
Lenovo says the notebook has an anti-glare 1366 x 768 pixel display, a drop resistant design that can withstand a fall of up to 2.3 feet and reinforced ports and hinges. It also has a water-resistant keyboard.
The notebook weighs 2.8 pounds and uses passive cooling. That means there’s no noisy fan in the case. It also means there are no moving parts under the hood, which should also make the Lenovo N21 Chromebook tougher to break than a typical notebook.
Other features include a 36 Wh battery which Lenovo says can be replaced by school IT departments, a USB 3.0 port and a USB 2.0 port, HDMI output, an SD card reader, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and TPM security.
Oh yeah… since these systems ship with Chrome OS rather than Windows, they also come without any bloatware (or malware).
Lenovo should begin shipping the N21 Chromebook by the end of March. It’ll sell for about $220 and up in the US with a starting price of $259 in Canada.
via +Brent Sullivan
Its funny how the world has changed in the last 8 months. Chromebooks had momentum, then Microsoft struck back with products like the HP Stream 11 and 13 – which really have “clean” Windows on them when purchased through the Microsoft Store (which tends to have good pricing), and often pricing lower than Chromebooks.
Thank God Google entered the notebook market. We would not see aggressive Windows/Intel pricing if they had not. It looks like Intel’s strategy is to make budget SOCs much cheaper than it presently does. It will innovate it’s way out of lower margins. I am expecting to see Microsoft get better at monitizing business customers, and consumer products will be a gateway to business use.
Yes, but the cheap Windows netbooks still have the infamous crappy Windows netbook performance which (in terms of full scope browser benchmarks) is about half the speed of a Chromebook with the same CPU, RAM and SSD. On top of that they have insufficient spare disk space if you want to install Windows apps, and are even slower than their browser benchmarks suggest if you actually want to run Windows legacy apps on them – which is the only reason for buying them over Chromebooks.
If you ask me, they are doing the Windows user community a great dis-service by under specifying the devices in order to try to match Chromebooks on price.
I’m not going to dispute browser benchmarks results, because I haven’t seen them. In everyday use, the newer netbooks are light years ahead of the previous generation in performance. As long as you keep your expectations reasonable, doing basic tasks is a nice experience.
I do agree about the disk space. 32 GB is barely enough to start with, and after a service pack and some updates, plus some applications, it won’t be enough. You can double the storage with an SD Card though. Hopefully the next generation will have 64 GB of internal storage.
I disagree about Windows legacy apps being the only advantage over Chromebooks. I do like having legacy app support, but it’s also about current app selection. I prefer Firefox over Chrome, and I can’t get Firefox on Chrome OS (and probably never will).
I belong to a writing group where we hang out at a coffee shop and chat and write for an hour or two. Until about three months ago, everyone was using either a Mac or PC (or pen and paper tech!), then the first Chromebook showed up. This week, for the first time, we had two people with Chromebooks out of the ten present. Probably not representative on any particular trend, but interesting nonetheless.
“Oh yeah… since these systems ship with Chrome OS rather than Windows, they also come without any bloatware (or malware).”
Actually, you need to be able to trust your OEM, even with ChromeOS. Alas, Lenovo, is no longer on my list of trusted OEMs. (Yes, I was burned by the recent Lenovo-SuperFish fiasco.)
It’s going to be a while before I buy another Lenovo PC now that Lenovo is known to be okay with putting spyware on their PCs and risking users to identity theft if they’re not caught. Allowing the interception and decryption of encrypted HTTPS traffic without the user knowing is a major security issue.
Yeah, but that is Windows.
What makes you think Lenovo wouldn’t do shady things with other OS’s? It’ll take a while before Lenovo can gain back the trust of users. Right now, any Lenovo product is suspect.
Really? They just apologized in public for their Snapfish nonsense. Do you really believe they would risk the kind of backlash they would get if they tried the same thing again right away? If anything, Lenovo is probably a safer bet than anyone else in the industry right now precisely because they’re still in the spotlight and still suffering from the fallout of their bad behavior.
It might seem counterintuitive, but then, how many people died on the roads after 9/11 because they felt safer driving cross-country than flying?
I really like those rounded corners. It’s a really nice looking Chromebook.