Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch: At First Glance
Lenovo’s Flex series is the more affordable set of convertible notebooks that serve as an alternative to their flagship Yoga line-up. With this Flex line-up, Lenovo aims to offer an affordable laptop to budget-conscious consumers, students, and those in need of an inexpensive flexible laptop.
This explains why Lenovo has been expanding the Flex series to include 11-inch to 15-inch models in order to appeal to a wider range of users. Our review unit here is the 11-inch Lenovo Flex 6 that was sold for $306 as of November 2021 when I wrote this review.
Despite its affordable price, the Lenovo Flex 6 still packs a considerably good range of hardware specs. However, one should know better to always prepare for certain drawbacks if a laptop costs this little.
Now the question is will the laptop’s drawbacks be more than its advantages and impressive features? Let’s find out!
Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch: Design, Dimension and Weight
It seems as though Lenovo did not just expand its Flex line-up, they have also taken the time to refine the design of laptops in the Flex lineup. This design re-touch is glaring on the 11-inch Flex 6.
The Flex 6 11-inch looks well refined for a $300 range laptop. It has a simple, fine-line design that gives it a sleek appearance.
More on the details of the Flex 6 11-inch’s design, it has a two-tone black plastic body covering that is made more vibrant with hints of silver accents. One of those design features with this silver accent is the Lenovo logo on the laptop’s lid.
This logo is neatly printed on the top left corner of the laptop’s lid. However, asides from this logo, you won’t see any other design pattern on the lid.
Another design feature with the silver accent is the laptop’s 360-degree dual aluminum hinges. These hinges are the main feature that makes it possible for the laptop to transform between tablet, tent, and stand modes.
Fortunately, these hinges remain solid to keep the laptop’s lid in place no matter the angle at which it is opened. Additionally, the construction quality on the Flex 6 11-ich’s hinges is excellent.
Moving on, when you open the laptop, you will begin to see clear indications of the laptop’s affordable price point. These indications are mainly in the upper part of the laptop, which is the display.
The first thing you will notice about the display is its thick bezels. Although the top bezel comfortably accommodates a webcam because of its thickness, I still find its thickness and that of the bottom and side bezels to be displeasing.
Moreover, this displeasure doesn’t end there. To be more specific, the Flex 6’s 11-inch display itself is a bit disappointing.
The 1366 x 786 HD resolution display on the Flex 6 11-inch suffers from unsteady color reproduction. In fact, the colors on this display already look washed out the moment you turn on the display.
Therefore, contents viewed on this HD resolution display will not appear fine and crisp. Fortunately, the Flex 6’s 11.6-inch screen size doesn’t make this defect very obvious, unlike the way it would be if it were to be a 15-inch display laptop.
Nonetheless, it still gives a cause for concern. To make things even worse, the laptop’s display is not so bright.
Specifically, the display offers a 206 nits brightness, falling behind the category average brightness of 250 nits. In comparison, the Acer Spin 1 offers a much better display brightness of 349 nits.
However, the Flex 6 11-inch display brightness is still much better compared to the HP Stream 11’s display’s 188 nits.
Moving on to the lower part of the Flex 6 11-inch, the concerns aroused by the laptop’s display will be overshadowed by its fancy-looking base – at least for the meantime.
This is where the laptop’s two-tone color scheme becomes more obvious. While the Flex 6’s lid and bottom panel are painted in deep charcoal gray, its keyboard deck is a shade lighter – Lenovo calls this color scheme Onyx Black.
Moreover, on the keyboard deck, there’s a stylish-looking island keyboard and a touchpad underneath the keyboard. The neat shape and gray color of the keys add to the design aesthetics of the Flex 6 11-inch.
Aesthetics aside, this laptop’s keyboard offers a satisfying typing experience. Also, aside from how excellent the keys feel to touch, they also have a decent key travel of 1.3 mm.
Furthermore, the 3.5 x 2.3-inch touchpad that sits below the keyboard equally offers an excellent user experience. The touchpad is soft and smooth, with gentle but sensitive click pressures.
With this touchpad, you will have no problem performing Windows 10 gestures.
In terms of weight and dimension, the Flex 6 11-inch may not be the biggest amongst its other 11-inch competing laptops, but it is quite chunky. The Flex 6 weighs 1250 g and measures 294 x 204 x 17.9 mm.
Compared to the HP Stream, the Flex 6 11-inch is slightly heavier but a bit smaller. To give precise details, the HP Stream weighs 1242.8 g and measures 299.974 x 205.74 x 19.812 mm.
On the other hand, the Flex 6 11-inch is lighter and more compact than the Acer Spin 1 that weighs 1501.4 g, and measures 325.12 x 228.6 x 18.8 mm.
Moreover, despite being lighter, the Flex 6 11-inch feels more solid compared to this Acer Spin 1 laptop. The HP Stream, on the other hand, can’t even be compared with the Flek 6 in terms of sturdiness.
Moving on, the Flex 6 11-inch is richly endowed when it comes to port selection. On the right side of this laptop, you get an HDMI port, one USB 3.1 port, and a LED power button.
Meanwhile, the left side houses the power jack, a USB 2.0 port, a 4-in-1 card reader, and a headphone jack.
Overall, this laptop’s design and build are fairly satisfactory for a $300 range laptop. It is sleek, sturdy, and it offers good design flexibility despite its inexpensive price.
As a result, it scores a seven in this design review.
Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch: Processor (CPU) Performance
There are two quad-core processor options available for the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch. Specifically, Lenovo ships the laptop with either an Intel Celeron N4100 processor or an Intel Pentium N5000 processor.
The Intel Celeron processor offers a base frequency of 2.10 GHz and a boost frequency of 2.40 GHz. Meanwhile, the Intel Pentium comes with a base frequency of 2.10 GHz and a boost frequency of 2.70 GHz.
To maintain clarity, you should know that our review unit is equipped with the Intel Celeron processor configuration option.
It is worth noting that Intel Celeron processors are mainly used for handling tasks that require low power. Hence, you shouldn’t expect the Flex 6 11-inch to be capable of handling highly-intensive computing operations.
However, the Flex 6 11-inch will do well with tasks such as word processing, web surfing, and video streaming. Since the Flex 6 is not so powerful in terms of raw processing power, I’ll advise you to not attempt to run heavy operations like video editing.
To further prove that this laptop isn’t suitable for intensive computational operations, I will highlight its performance record on the Cinebench benchmark.
In case you are wondering, the Cinebench benchmark is a test tool that accesses the performance capabilities of a laptop’s processor. It tests for when only one of the processor’s cores is in use and when all of its cores are put to use.
On a Cinebench R15 benchmark test, the Flex 6 11-inch scored 65 points in the single-core aspect and 138 points in the multi-core aspect. Comparatively, the laptop was able to outscore the Lenovo Ideapad 120s that scored 46 points in the single-core aspect and 85 in the multi-core aspect.
Meanwhile, the Acer Swift 1 outscored the Flex 6 in both aspects. Specifically, the Acer Swift 1 scored 73 points in the single-core aspect while it scored 236 points in the multi-core aspect.
Surely, we can tell from these results that the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch isn’t suitable for heavy-duty computing operations. However, the laptop performs adequately when it comes to handling basic computing operations.
Hence, it scores a seven in this review section for its fair processor performance.
Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch: Memory (RAM) Performance
The Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch comes with an 8 GB DDR4-2400 MHz RAM. In case you are wondering if you could, you cannot upgrade this laptop’s RAM because it is soldered to the laptop’s motherboard.
Fortunately, this laptop offers a good memory performance, so you might not have to think of upgrading its RAM size. To prove its memory performance efficiency, I will share details of how the Lenovo Flex 6 performed on a multitasking test.
On a multitasking test, the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch could conveniently run 15 Google Chrome tabs while a YouTube video was playing.
That’s not all, the laptop was also able to put up a good performance in the PCMark 10 benchmark test. Essentially, this PCMark 10 benchmark test checks how well a laptop can handle multitasking activities and productivity tasks.
On this test, the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch scored 1438 points. Comparatively, It outperformed the Lenovo Ideapad 120s which scored 1150 points.
Overall, the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch does not possess incredible multitasking capabilities, but it is powerful enough to handle most of your RAM-intensive tasks.
In conclusion, the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch scores an eight in this review because it offers an efficient RAM performance.
Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch: Storage Options and Performance
Lenovo equips the Flex 6 11-inch with a 128 GB eMMC storage drive. Moreover, the laptop also offers a 4-in-1 card reader for external storage expansion.
Unfortunately, this external storage option can only help to increase storage capacity, there’s no way it can help improve the eMMC drive’s slow speed. Like most eMMC drives, the storage drive on the Flex 6 11-inch is painfully slow.
Although we weren’t able to get a CrystalDiskMark benchmark test result for this laptop’s storage drive, the file transfer test was enough to ascertain its speed.
Specifically, on the file transfer test, the 128 GB eMMC in the Flex 6 copied a 4.97GB file in 2 minutes and 24 seconds, equalling a transfer rate of 35.8 megabytes per second. This rate is level with the Asus VivoBook W202NA’s 35 MBps transfer rate.
However, the Flex 6 11-inch lags behind Acer’s Spin 1’s 83.5 MBps transfer rate. Similarly, the Flex 6 trails behind HP’s Stream 11 that copied the file at a transfer rate of 50.4 MBps.
In conclusion, the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch neither impresses in terms of its storage capacity nor its storage speed. As a result, it scores a six in this storage performance review.
Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch: Graphics Card performance
The Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch offers two graphics card options. Specifically, the laptop is sold with either an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 600 graphics card or an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 605 graphics card.
If you equip your unit with the Intel UHD Graphics 600 card, you will get a base frequency of 200 MHz and a boost frequency of 650 MHz. Meanwhile, the Intel UHD Graphics 605 offers a base frequency of 200 MHz and a boost frequency of 750 MHz.
However, none of these graphics card options comes with a dedicated VRAM. This is because they are integrated graphics cards, which means they share the system memory with the CPU.
For this review, our unit makes use of the Intel UHD Graphics 600. The first thing you need to know is that this graphics card is not ideal for gaming.
It will, however, perform better with 1080p and 4K video playback on YouTube or any video streaming app. There’s no doubt that the graphics card on the Lenovo Flex 6 is efficient at delivering good graphical content.
The 3DMark benchmark test results clearly prove this. In case you don’t know what the 3DMark benchmark is, it is a benchmark tool that tests the graphics capabilities of a laptop.
On the 3DMark Ice Storm graphics test, the Flex 6 11-inch performed quite well. In fact, it outperformed most of its competitors.
To give more detail, the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch scored 25,678 points, surpassing the Acer Spin 1’s 24,193 points. Moreover, the Lenovo Flex also outscored the ASUS VivoBook which scored 21,884 points.
However, as I already stated, this laptop is not good for gaming at all. It barely runs most modern title games at smooth frame rates.
For example, when it ran BioShock Infinite on low settings, it struggled to play the game at 19.9 frames per second.
Therefore, if you are going to buy the Lenovo Flex 6, gaming shouldn’t be one of the things you intend to use the laptop for. Asides from basic graphics rendering tasks, the laptop won’t do well with more graphically intensive tasks.
Besides, the Flex 6 is not a gaming laptop, so you shouldn’t expect an excellent gaming performance from the laptop.
To round things off, the Lenovo Flex scores a seven in this graphics review section for its average graphics performance.
Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch: Battery Life & Performance
The Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch features a 3-cell 36 Wh Li-polymer battery. Lenovo advertised that this battery lasts up to 6 hours.
Though Lenovo’s claim doesn’t sound bad, what’s really interesting here is the actual battery runtime that this laptop can offer. Surprisingly, this laptop lasted for 9 hours 6 minutes on a continuous web surfing test.
To give more detail, this test involves continuous surfing the web with Wi-Fi under medium screen brightness.
In comparison with one of its competitors, the Acer Spin 1, the Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch offers a longer battery life. Specifically, on the same web surfing test, the Acer Spin 1 lasted for 6 hours and 8 minutes.
Based on the test results, the Flex 6’s battery life is impressive – at least for a budget laptop. After all, most budget laptops often offer a battery life that hovers around the 7-hour mark.
In conclusion, the Flex 6 11-inch scores an eight in this battery review section for its admirable battery life.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch battery can last for as long as 9 hours and 6 minutes when running under basic computing workload like web surfing.
Yes, it does. The Lenovo Flex 6 11-inch display is a touchscreen.
Lenovo offers two configuration options for the Flex 6’s GPU. You can either buy the laptop with an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 600 card or an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 605 card.
The Flex 6 11-inch features an 8 GB memory.
According to Wikipedia, Lenovo Group Limited – often shortened to Lenovo – is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related services.
Conclusion
Overall, the Lenovo Flex 6 is a well-built laptop that offers incredible functionality at a reasonable price point. However, if not for its thick bezels and mediocre display, the Flex 6 could have been able to easily pass for a mid-level laptop.
In fact, the design aesthetics and flexibility that this laptop offers would have sealed the deal. However, its overall performance is not so great.
Nevertheless, if you need a budget laptop that can last you through a workday while handling your basic computing workloads, the Lenovo Flex 6 11 inch is a good option.
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