Call it the “Surface lite.” Announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday and due to ship in June, Lenovo’s ideapad Miix 310 gives budget users a Surface-like 2-in-1 experience with a detachable keyboard.
While it’s hardly high-powered—it sports an Intel Atom X5 8300 CPU and integrated graphics—it boasts 10 hours of battery life. Unlike the limited Surface RT tablets of the not-so-distant past, too, it runs full Windows 10 (the Home version).
Lenovo defines the Miix 310’s user as an “online addict” who wants to be fully connected wherever they are. I don’t know about the addiction part, but the 128GB of eMMC memory certainly provides a lot of room to store content. You get 802.11b/g/n connectivity standard, and 4G LTE is optional. The memory maxes out at 2GB. A Full HD display option (1920×1080) is available, but the default display is lower-res.
No one wants to eat up tablet space with a soft keyboard. The included keyboard with the ideapad Miix 310 lets you be productive at will. I tried the keyboard briefly. Given its thinness it felt tolerable, though nothing like the Lenovo keyboards you see on high-end laptops. For a starting price of $229, though, you can’t complain too much. This is a machine you’d buy for recreational use, and you wouldn’t be out too much if it broke or went missing.