14 DAY TRIAL // Back at CES 2014 in Las Vegas Lenovo rolled out the Flex 14D and Flex 15D laptop convertibles, alongside two new models of its popular Miix 2 tablets.
Now, many months later after the official launch, Lenovo is taking the opportunity to update the Flex 15D bumping up the processor inside with a more recent itineration.
The Flex 15D arrives with a design inspired from one of Lenovo’s most popular product to date, the Yoga. The laptop can’t be turned into a tablet per se, but it allows the rotation of the screen with 300° and 360°.
The device can be configured into the tent position or can be placed with the display facing away from the keyboard, so users are encouraged to share the content more easily.
Originally, the Flex 15D took advantage of the AMD platform which consisted of two APUs, the E1-2100 and A4-5000 both pertaining to the Kabini family. But Lenovo is replacing the earlier architecture with the newer AMD APU A6-6310 called Beema, says Fuzdilla.
This is a quad-core processor with a clock rate of 2GHz with burst speeds climbing as far as 2.4GHz, depending on the workload under which the device is submitted.
Beema is made with a 28nm manufacturing process and boasts a TDP of 15W and therefore is perfect for a medium-range notebook such as the Flex 15D.
The graphics system is AMD Radeon R4, based on the new architecture GCN (Graphics Core Next), and arrives with 128 shaders so users should see a performance similar to that of Radeon HD 7470M.
Beyond this revamp in the processor department, the Flex 15D remains pretty much the device we have seen make an appearance at CES 2014 a month ago.
The convertible offers a pretty spacious 15-inch display with the standard resolution (1366 x 768 pixels) you would see on any laptop these days.
Apart from that, the notebook arrives with 8GB of RAM and hard drives with a capacity of traditional 500GB to 1TB of storage.
Other specifications list the omnipresent AccuType keyboard with optional backlighting and a sound system with support for Dolby Advanced Audio v2. Thanks to the very low power consumption of Beema, the battery should last up to 9 full hours, which is pretty swell for a convertible that wants to replace your laptop.
At the moment, we don’t have the pricing specifications for the new Beema-enhanced laptop, but the AMD A4-5000 with 1GB of RAM and 500GB hard drive will take you back with $449 / €330.