Gadgetory

Lenovo already had a respectable mid-range surface pro clone with the mix 510 so instead of scrapping the thing entirely and starting fresh it kept a design and made a couple of tweaks to just make the whole thing better and called it the mix 5:20 let's start with the design though again it's essentially unchanged from the 510 which means it's pretty much identical to the old surface Pro for the built-in kickstand is nice and strong and uses lenovo's watchband hinges that give you a big positioning range you might still find it awkward to use on your lap though and in general I just throw it over a cross-leg to balance it out lenovo includes its magnetic keyboard and it's active pen too with the tablet so you're ready to go out of the box the backlit keyboard in general I like the key travel is good considering how thin the cover is but there's definitely some bounce to it when you're typing its touchpad is on the small side which could be frustrating but there is a 12 point 2 inch touchscreen right in front of you the screen has a 1920 by 1200 resolution so it's not as sharp as a 4k display but I never felt like I was missing out for a casual sketching or taking notes the bundled act of pen 2 is great but creatives who need a screen with accurate colors will probably want to pass regardless also while the display gets reasonably bright you'll probably have trouble using it outside on one side of the screen are the power and volume buttons and a combo headphone mic jack and on the other side are USB C and USB a 3.0 ports and the power jack the USB C port is in Thunderbolt 3 but you can connect up a dock for video output in peripherals what's a bit of an annoyance though is that lenovo's pin storage solution is this little plastic piece that not only ties up your USB port but partially blocks the power jack in USB C port what's new is in sigh 1/8 gen intel core i5 processor the new chip along with its other components gave the system a noticeable bump in multi-core performance on our benchmarks but just felt snappier overall and along with the improved performance you'll get slightly better battery life we got 6 hours and 27 minutes in our streaming video test but you'll definitely hear the fans blowing when they're under a heavy load so while it's not perfect between the performance improvements and the overall features you get a really good mid-range package for around $1,000