The Lenovo ThinkPad 11e is the best rugged laptop you can buy at this price if your work doesn’t rely on Windows. Nowadays, with “work from home” getting normalized, many users feel the need for a portable computer to perform regular day-to-day office work. And the ThinkPad 11e is the best laptop for that, both performance, build quality, and price-wise.
Why We Like It – Lenovo ThinkPad 11e
Chromebooks, or rather Chrome OS, has come a long way over the last few years. It is much more functional, stylish, and capable nowadays, so you shouldn’t face any big usability issue with the Lenovo ThinkPad 11e. And the price point is just so good that you can overlook a few performance issues, if any.
- Extremely affordable price
- 16GB eMMC Flash storage
- Chrome OS
- The webcam isn’t great
Power & Performance
This Chromebook sports a quad core Intel Celeron N3150 CPU and four gigs of memory inside. Now that might not sound like much, but it’s perfectly fine for a low powered Chromebook. It also comes with 16GB of eMMC Flash storage. It’s not going to be as fast as a dedicated solid state drive (SSD), for that matter, but it’s good enough for the price.
Battery
Because of the low powered hardware inside, you can get up to 10 hours of battery life out of the 42WHr battery. That’s still not close to what the LG Gram 17 can achieve, but at this price, you can’t really complain about it. Be sure to also check out the Lenovo IdeaPad s340 review if you want a laptop with a great battery life.
Ports & Expandability
Even though it’s a cheap Chromebook, don’t worry; you do get all the ports you’ll pretty much ever need. You get a USB 3.0 port, a USB 2.0 port, an ethernet port, HDMI, and a headphone combo jack. Once again, if you need a built-in SD card reader, get the Panasonic Toughbook instead.
Build Quality
It is very durably built. Generally, we’d say to subvert your expectations at these kinds of price points, but not in this case. Both the keyboard and the trackpad are actually very good. Overall it is as well built as the much costlier Lenovo ThinkPad P52 workstation. The plastic body is the only difference. But it’s not cheap plastic either.
Related: See also our Lenovo Thinkpad P52 review for a rugged laptop that you can use outdoors.
Value
The fact that you can get a complete package like this Chromebook at just $160 is quite incredible, to say the least. And Chrome OS is perfectly capable of handling day to day work and is especially perfect for students and their online classes.
Lenovo ThinkPad 11e Wrap Up
The Lenovo ThinkPad 11e is an excellent cheap Chromebook that performs very well for the price. A higher capacity hard drive would’ve been nice to see, but you can easily add an external one for extra storage.
