Lenovo Flex 5 14 2-in-1 Laptop, 14.0" FHD Touch Display, AMD Ryzen 5 4500U, 16GB RAM, 256GB Storage, AMD Radeon Graphics, Digital Pen Included, Win 10

Overall I am simply amazed at what Lenovo has accomplished at this price point.I bought this in tandem with a new 2020 Apple Macbook Air and am returning the Air, not because it's not a great device, but it's simply not better (in fact it's not quite as good in terms of overall power and a healthy balance of office work + lite gaming, which is my use case) at $400 more ($300 as of this review) for with half the ram.A few things to note since they seem to come up in some of the other reviews. It does seem like like some buyers are seeing certain quality control issues, which is too bad, but I am very happy to report I have not had them.Touchpad:The touchpad on my unit is solid - not loose and no wiggling or movement at all unless you purposefully click it. I know exactly what others are talking about though as I formerly owned a Lenovo 730s which had that issue. It's not a big deal and you get used to it, but it does make you feel like the touchpad isn't quite as high quality as the rest of the machine.Screen:I have the same experience as most here. I am writing this review from the Flex 5 in a well lit room (with light directly overhead) and the screen looks great and is certainly bright enough, but is also maxed out. At 250 nits, there are relatively few occasions in which the screen *won't* be maxed out, but that's fine! Another note on the screen - IPS "bleed" is a well known phenomenon, and I am very happy to report the screen on my unit has very little - in fact it's so hard to even notice unless you know what you're looking for that I couldn't capture an actual image of it. No dead pixels on this unit, and overall I am very happy with it given the price.PerformanceSee all the other reviews - the Ryzen 4500 with iGPU is simply fantastic for everything from low-power office work and streaming videos to lite gaming. It's amazing. Buy a Ryzen machine.BatteryYou can see my use case is essentially office work (lots of Word docs open at once, sometimes excel, Edge (sorry, Chrome) with usually 6-10 tabs, and Slack, and I'm seeing around 7-8 hours of battery life. Really not bad.WebcamThe 720p webcam...isn't amazing. But it's enough for Zoom calls and who honestly wants an ultra high resolution cam these days (none of us are looking our best ;D). That said, my ONE quality control issue is that the actual sensor is *slightly* off behind the protective glass of the screen. See the first image I've included. This does not affect the camera functionality in any way - it doesn't block the image or anything - and the well-designed privacy slider works perfectly (see second image).KeyboardIf you've used a recent Lenovo keyboard - this is the same. They are excellent and I only wish they required a *little* more pressure to press (maybe I just have heavy hands). Otherwise the keyboard is perfect, without issue, and Lenovo has figured out a smart modified system for the function keys that allow some of the most commonly used things (like Windows settings, calculator, screenshot and lock screen) to work with a single tap. Sound, brightness and other common settings are there, too.Sound:Haven't experienced any of the sound popping issues others have - either through the speakers or headphones. No issues at all. Sounds isn't incredible, but it's good.All in all - I can't believe this is $600. Buy it - you won't regret it.

TL;DR Overall a very nice laptop, would recommend <$700I've had this laptop for about 6 months, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it.CPU: The CPU in this laptop is excellent. For daily web browsing honestly this CPU is a bit overkill. Unlike on some laptops, this laptop has built in power profiles that let you increase the processor's TDP in order to get better performance, which allows it to overtake some of the cheaper 4700U based laptops (albeit with more power usage). Using the "Extreme Performance" power profile, the CPU will use about 30-35W continuously and has a max burst power usage of 45W. Max temps in Extreme Performance mode are generally around 95C, and in "Intelligent Cooling" mode (basically Balanced Power:Performance) they are around 75C.GPU: The iGPU does fine. It's enough to let you play some older games at decent framerates, and maybe some new titles with some convincing. Performance is pretty standard for a 4500U based laptop.RAM: This laptop features dual channel 3200MHz DDR4 RAM, which the Ryzen CPU is quite happy with. However, the RAM is soldered and there is no way to expand it.SSD: Mine came with a 256GB NVMe SSD (Union Memory 8SSSS0W761B1Z1CH05X0XH0). While this isn't going to win any awards, its decently fast and gets the job done. If you want to, the SSD in this laptop is replaceable with a 2280 or shorter, but unless you want to either buy or 3D print a SSD extension, this laptop will take 2280 and 2242 drives out of the box.WiFi/BT: The internet wasn't very helpful in identifying what WiFi/BT card this comes with, but it is either a RTL8822BE or RTL8822CE, the only noticeable difference between these 2 cards is one supports BT 4.2, while the other supports BT 5. Based off of the description on this Amazon listing, its probably the RTL8822BE. While I kinda wish this laptop came with a WiFi 6 card, it is swappable and an AX210 only costs about $20. I do not believe there is a WiFi adapter whitelist in the BIOS either so any wireless adapter should work fine as long as it is an M.2 E key card.Screen: It's okay. With only 250 nits of brightness, I wouldn't recommend it if you plan on using this outside often. The hinges are just about stiff enough to not have the screen violently shake while typing, but also soft enough to be able to open with just a single hand.Touch: The touchscreen is probably my favorite part of this laptop. Although it only has 4096 pressure levels, it is plenty to write on and is probably enough to sketch. The touchscreen feels decent to use and this laptop comes with a pen that takes 1 AAAA battery (1 is included), which also feels decent to use. The laptop also feels quite nice to use in tablet mode.Battery: I usually end up getting around 8 hours or so under typical usage. There probably is some room for improvement but 8 hours is already enough for me and I don't want to sacrifice features.Keyboard: The keyboard feels okay. As far as I know it uses the standard scissor mechanism with rubber domes. The keyboard also has a backlight with multiple brightness levels.Touchpad: The touchpad is decent. It supports gestures, and has a left, middle and right click. The middle click is something I quite enjoy.Chassis: The chassis feels very nice for ABS plastic. It has a nice finish to it that makes it feel surprisingly premium.IO: This laptop has a DC barrel jack, type C PD, HDMI port, 3.5mm combo jack, 2 USB 3 ports and a half length SD card slot. This laptop comes with a USB Type C charger (very nice). The type C port can act both to charge and as a standard USB 3 port with an adapter. I am not sure if this port supports video out, as I don't have anything to test it with and Google gives me mixed results. The laptop seems to be able to charge off of basically any PD capable adapter, however lower power adapters will make the CPU throttle down to 400MHz.Audio Out: The speakers are upwards firing and sound okay for laptop speakers. The built in DAC definitely won't replace an external DAC, but for a laptop its pretty good. It sounds decent and provides up to 32 bit audio at 48khz sampling rate. It's output power is a little weak, but it can still drive 50 ohm headphones without a problem. The HDMI audio out supports 32 bit 192 khz audio.Audio In: The internal microphone sounds okay but picks up a lot of noise, both in the electrical sense and in the background sense. Typing and clicking on the trackpad are about 2/3 as loud as my voice is.Serviceability: Pop the back panel off and you have access to basically everything. A screen replacement seems to be pretty standard in terms of difficulty.Included OS: My memory isn't too great for this part since uninstalling the included OS was the 2nd thing I did. However from what I remember it was Windows 10 Home, and the bloatware was okay. It mostly came with Lenovo stuff for the laptop.Other OS Support: Linux support on this laptop is amazing, as long as you are running kernel 5.9 or newer. The laptop does not work properly at all in kernels 5.6 or older. Distros that I know include a new enough kernel and are for normal desktop usage are Ubuntu 21.04 (no stable release as of this review), Debian Bullseye (also not released yet), and basically all Arch Linux derivatives (Manjaro Linux is highly recommended by me, especially for this laptop). If you are going to boot Linux, make sure you are on the newest BIOS as older BIOSs have issues suspending. I highly recommend checking out this page if you want to tinker with this laptop on Linux (I did not have any of the mentioned issues that are on this page). https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_IdeaPad_5_14are05#Tips_and_tricksFreeBSD based OSs boot, however are currently missing drivers in 12.x such as for the touchscreen, touchpad and WiFi/BT.Other Notes: The AMD PSP is disableable on this laptop, which is a bit nice. There also exists a patch that you can apply to the BIOS for this laptop to unlock a bunch of stuff, including some base clock overclocking (this of course voids your warranty). Check out CodeHusky's video for more information on that. This BIOS mod does require a SOIC8 clip as the stock firmware flashing utility does not accept the modded BIOS file.