As promised earlier this year, LG is bringing its first 5G-ready laptop to market. The new Lenovo Flex 5G is a thin and light convertible notebook with a 14 inch touchscreen display, a 360-degree hinge, and built-in support for 5G connectivity as well as WiFi and Bluetooth.
It will also be the first computer to ship with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx 5G processor when the Lenovo Flex 5G goes on sale June 18th.
Lenovo says that means you can expect long battery life, always-connected capabilities, and well… the company isn’t really making any promises when it comes to raw processing power. The Lenovo Flex 5G will be available from Verizon later this week for $1400 (or for $58.33 per month if you’d rather spread out the payments over 2 years).
Lenovo and Qualcomm first announced plans to create a 5G laptop code-named “Project Limitless” more than a year ago. And while it will be one of the first 5G laptops to hit the streets, it’s using a processor that’s really more of a souped-up smartphone chip than a laptop processor — reviews of the Microsoft Surface Pro X (which has a similar, but not identical processor) suggest that Qualcomm’s latest chips for Windows computers excel at energy efficiency and connectivity… but run into problems when running Windows applications that aren’t optimized for ARM architecture.
That could make the $1400 price tag for the Lenovo Flex 5G tough to swallow. But if you’re primarily interested in a portable device with long battery life and an always-available internet connection and don’t mind running apps that are optimized (including Microsoft Office), then maybe a Windows on ARM device isn’t such a bad value proposition.
The Lenovo Flex 5G does feature premium materials and features. It has an aluminum lid and a magnesium aluminum alloy body, a backlit keyboard, and generally decent specs… although some of them read more like smartphone or tablet specs than laptop features.
Here’s a run-down of the Flex 5G’s hardware:
| Display | 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS 400-nit touchscreen |
| Processor | Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx 5G |
| RAM | 8GB LPDDR4X-1866 (soldered) |
| Storage | 256GB/512GB UFS 3.0 |
| Connectivity | 5G, 4G LTE, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0 |
| Ports | 2 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C, 3.5mm audio, nano SIM card |
| Security | IR camera (face recognition), fingerprint reader, TPM 2.0 |
| Camera | 720p |
| Microphones | Dual |
| Keyboard | Backlit |
| Battery | 60Wh |
| Charging | 45W USB-C |
| Dimensions | 12.7″ x 8.5″ 0.6″ |
| Weight | 2.97 lbs |
While the laptop will be available as the Lenovo Flex 5G and sold by Verizon in the United States, Lenovo says it will also be available in other countries later this year and may be branded as the Lenovo Yoga 5G in select markets.
I want this! … But with Linux pre-installed.
Alas…
—
@Brad: have you switched the website to a PWA or something? The caching on it showed me the same stories on the home page for three days straight and I missed three pages of cool tech news in that time!
That’s really strange. We switched to a new theme on Saturday and made a DNS change. It can take up to a day or two for DNS changes to propogate, but it shouldn’t take a whole week — that’s why I did it over the weekend. Glad your back now!
Does not appear to be an issue with that. Currently I am having to refresh the page every time I am visiting to see the new content rather than what I have been seeing last time. So it must be an issue of over-aggressive caching.
Checking my Networking tab in developer tools shows that on a refresh almost all resources are loaded from my local browser cache rather than from the server.
This is on Firefox – but I doubt that would be relevant.
Hmm, we haven’t changed any caching settings on our end, and I’m not able to replicate this issue at all, but I’ll check with our web host and see if they have any ideas.
More detail:
If I go from the homepage to page 3 where this article currently shows up, so that I can follow up on this conversation, it still shows that this article only has 3 comments as it did when it last cached the page.
So this is very aggressive caching indeed. And it does it on all pages.
Do you use a CDN? It might be something in the CDN settings. Or if it’s a WordPress / similar install, an over-eager plugin.
I should add that I am not having similar issues with other tech news sites at the moment, so I don’t think it is something specific to my browser.
Any improvement in the last few days?
Actually, next question — do you happen to be using uBlock Origin?
If a 10″ screened notebook or, even better, a smaller handheld comes out with Windows on ARM, I’d buy it. It’d replace my GPD MicroPC where built-in mobile broadband would make it more useful. I’m using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Linux on it but I don’t mind using Windows since I’m more interested in the form factor than my choice of the desktop OS.
I am rooting for Windows on Arm. I like the idea of an always-connected laptop, but I am going to wait until the performance gets to the point where I can do photo and video editing on the go. I suspect I will be waiting awhile.
Amazing specs, but wrong OS. This needs to be a Chromebook. I’m not convinced that Windows on ARM is going to get any better. Win32 software is disappearing quickly, and nobody is making Universal Windows apps (or whatever they’re calling it). I was really expecting to see Microsoft offering some kind of incentive to developers.
So far, the list of native ARM64 applications is limited to utilities like 7Zip, VLC, Notepad++, etc. I can’t imagine spending $500 on a laptop with a software library that includes Microsoft Office, Asphalt 8, and a bunch of freeware utilities. It’s like Chrome OS before they had Android App support.
I really wonder if Apple announces ARM on MacOS if software companies would start focusing on redeveloping their software for ARM, and perhaps some of that effort might benefit Windows on ARM?