If you read my post about Chrome OS being a conundrum, I may have mislead you a little about the crashing problem. To be fair, it was my first experience with Chrome OS, so I didn’t consider the possibility that my brand new device from a reputable brand was faulty. So I thought I would write a quick follow-up post to correct those claims.

In my case, the crashing issue was faulty firmware on my device. I sent it to Lenovo for repairs and it came back crash-free. So to be clear, Chrome OS was NOT the source of the crashes I experienced. It was not Linux or Android apps running on the device that caused the crashes. It was simply a faulty device.

Having said that, there are many reports of Android apps that do not work correctly on Chrome OS. And although the Linux environment is a welcome addition, it runs in a virtual machine, which means there is a noticeable performance hit. The bottom line on my device is that opening a terminal and running most of the command line programs I use is great. A graphical text editor or simple word processor is fine too. But opening a beefier graphical application like a web browser is painfully slow and sometimes glitchy.

All of this combines to make the IdeaPad Duet 3 a great tablet with an attached keyboard, but a rather poor laptop. It can be a laptop in a pinch, but I could never make it my daily driver. So it’s not quite the multipurpose device I had hoped for. And there are the usual privacy concerns that accompany using anything from Google or Microsoft, but that’s a different post.

Combine that with the fact that the iPad has finally become useful. When I tried an iPad before, I was unable to access the same files with 2 different apps. In my case, a git client and a text editor. But since my last experience with an iPad, Apple as given apps the ability to share their files with other apps. This means the primary roadblock to me using an iPad has been removed. (And iCloud is a non-starter for me. Apple-only, unavailable to my Linux systems.)

In the end, the IdeaPad failed to meet my original expectations. And perhaps my expectations were a bit too high. It’s a great little device, and if my needs were different, it might be my primary device. But for my use case, the IdeaPad still leaves me needing my laptop, which negates the need for a multipurpose device. The bottom line is that if I am going to have 2 devices anyway, I might as well have 2 single-purpose devices.

So I now have a laptop and an iPad instead of a single, dual-purpose device. And that works for me at this point. (Just a note that Apple usually sells last year’s iPad for around $300 – $350, so not a bad deal)

And as a side note, do NOT get me started on the fold-over 2-in-1 laptops. So terrible. Not even remotely interested. They just make for a wonky laptop and an awkward, heavy tablet. It’s truly baffling to me how this form factor has become so popular.