Lenovo Ideapad Miix 310 review: Good for basic tasks

Critic Rating3/5

User Rating3.4/5

Top Features

*Sturdy build and design 
*Good display 
*Lasting battery

When it comes to laptops, consumers have no dearth of choice these days. From HP and Acer to Asus and Dell, all major PC manufacturers have a diverse array of offerings in the market. These are available at multiple price points and in numerous form factors such as netbooks and convertibles, further making the choice difficult.

Lenovo's Ideapad range includes quite a few well rounded laptops. Having launched the Ideapad 110 a while back, the company recently added the Miix 310 to the line-up. The compact 2-in-1 can be used both as a tablet and a laptop, and comes with decent specs too. But is it really any good?

We spent a few days testing the Lenovo Miix 310 and here's the rest of our review.

Design and build quality
The build quality and design of the Lenovo Ideapad Miix 310 is pretty decent, at least for the price. Although the convertible feels a little bit on the heavier side, it's small enough to be carried in a sleeve or a regular bag.

The Miix 310 is Silver in colour and comes with a keyboard dock attached to it. Made of plastic, it has a 10-inch display of 1280x800 pixel resolution (There's another version with Full HD display as well). Above the screen lies a 2MP video-calling camera, while a 5MP primary camera and Lenovo branding sits at the back.

Although the Miix 310 is a convertible, it is noteworthy that it can only be used in the laptop and tablet modes and not in other modes like tent or stand, which is something the company's Yoga series of devices can do.

The keyboard is quite simple looking. It has Black coloured keys and a track pad right below them. We found both the keyboard and trackpad to be quite easy and efficient to use during our testing. While the keys have good feedback, the trackpad is quite responsive too.
Coming to the display, we found the Miix 310's 10-inch screen with 1280x800 resolution to be quite good. Colour reproduction is accurate and the display is sufficiently bright too. There's no pixelation either. Whether it's watching videos or movies, the Miix 310 is going to serve you just fine.

That said, we should also point out that the display a little reflective. This makes it a little hard to be used outdoors. However, the multi-touch support is really good and really helps in navigation.
To sum it up, we found the overall design and build quality of the Lenovo Miix 310 to be simple yet stylish. The display is quite good (especially for the price), and the responsive touchscreen makes things better.

Performance
Powered by an Intel Atom x5 processor coupled with 2GB of RAM, Lenovo Miix 310 has 64GB of eMMC flash storage. Considering its relatively small size, there are many connectivity ports either. The tablet features a micro HDMI port and microUSB 2.0 port, along with a charging port. The keyboard dock itself comes with two USB 2.0 ports.

Considering that it's a basic 2-in-1 meant for light everyday computing, the Lenovo Miix 310 performed fairly well during our testing. We opened a 5-6 tabs in Google Chrome as a sample test case. But switching tabs caused the web page to reload every time. It can be inferred that multitasking isn't the strong point of the Lenovo Miix 310.

Full HD video playback (both streaming and local) works pretty well. Audio output, while not exactly the best, is loud enough and balanced for everyday usage.
Both the front and rear cameras of the Lenovo Miix 310 are average at best. The front-facing camera is especially disappointing.

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One aspect of the Miix 310 that we found to be really good is battery life. It lasted over 5 hours with regular usage, involving social media, watching videos on YouTube and browsing the internet.

Verdict

At a price of Rs 17,490, we found the Lenovo Miix 310 to be an average performer. While its build quality and design are certainly good, the convertible can't handle multitasking really well. But for the price, it's hard to complain.

In a nutshell, the Lenovo Miix 310 is adequate for basic computing tasks. But don't expect it to help you with things like multitasking and video editing.

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