Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 (2023) Review: A Fantastic Value Laptop

Key Takeaways

• The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 is a budget-friendly laptop with a striking design and impressive performance power.
• The laptop features a slim and lightweight design, a comfortable keyboard, and a crisp 1080p display.
• However, the speakers and the 720p webcam fall short, and the battery life is only decent at 50% brightness.

I’ve tested my fair share of Lenovo laptops, from workhorse ThinkPads to premium Yoga 2-in-1 laptops, and they’ve always delivered. I was intrigued by this budget-friendly IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 (2023) from Lenovo that promised so much for so little money. While it didn’t exceed expectations in certain categories, the Slim 3i is a great value for students, workers, or anyone else who needs a simple laptop.

The IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 boasts a slimmer design than its predecessor with narrow bezels, an optimal setup for video calls, and a battery life that lets you stay unplugged longer. This laptop certainly features a striking, slim form factor with a comfortable keyboard and crisp 1080p display, but its video call quality and battery life fall slightly short.

You’ll sound great on video calls with the dual-array microphone but don’t rely on the built-in speakers to hear everyone clearly. With video calls becoming more frequent in the modern world, many laptops feature a 1080p webcam, but the IdeaPad Slim 3i is only equipped with a 720p webcam, which blurs edges and dulls colors on-screen. Then, the 6-hour battery life at 50% brightness may be plenty for some, but won’t be enough for others.

There are areas where Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 3i falls short, but its impressive performance power outweighs these negatives. This laptop handled everything I threw at it smoothly and proved itself a worthy contender in the world of budget-friendly laptops.

Price and Availability

At the time of writing, the best place to buy the IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 is Newegg, where you’ll find it for $474.99. Alternatively, you can buy the laptop from Staples for $529.99 or Lenovo for $659.99, though it frequently goes on sale on Lenovo’s website.

A Slim Design in a Beautiful Blue Color

For a budget-friendly laptop, Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 3i sure looks premium. It sports this beautiful Abyss Blue color, has a slim form factor, and feels smooth and slightly cool to the touch. It weighs 3.52 pounds and measures 14.1 x 9.3 x 0.7 inches, making it the perfect travel companion for any student or worker in need of a mobile workstation.

According to Lenovo, the IdeaPad Slim 3i is “engineered with military-grade quality,” meaning that it’s able to withstand shock, dust, and other harsh travel conditions. Of course, I didn’t evaluate dropping the laptop or spraying dust at it, but it’s a feature worth noting for those who may be in explore of a travel laptop that can withstand getting bumped around in a backpack all day.

This laptop features quite a few available ports, an impressive feat for this price. On the left side, you’ll find the power-in port, which unfortunately isn’t a USB-C charging port, but the laptop is still capable of rapid charging through this power port. Then, there’s also one USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, one HDMI 1.4 port, one full-function USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, and a headphone/microphone combo jack.

On the right side, there’s an SD card reader, which is becoming an increasingly rare find on modern laptops. Then, you’ll find an additional USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port.

Opening the laptop up, you’ll see a full-size keyboard equipped with a 10-key number pad. In the top right corner, the power button doubles as a fingerprint reader that lets you unlock the laptop quickly.

Display: Fairly Crisp, But Not Very Vibrant

This laptop is equipped with a 15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS display with an LED backlight, narrow bezels, anti-glare, and TÜV Certified Low Blue Light. Using this laptop for daily work was a breeze, with a large enough display to split two windows comfortably and touchscreen capability to quickly select photos.

With 1080p resolution, edges and tiny details are blurred, so don’t expect to see pores on faces or individual strands of hair. However, compared to other 1080p laptops I’ve tested, this display came through a little better, possibly due to its 300 nits max brightness.

If you’ve ever experienced an OLED or Mini-LED display, this laptop’s display won’t look very vibrant. Looking at the same YouTube still on my smartphone, my personal laptop’s 4K OLED display, and this laptop’s 1080p display made the Slim 3i display look pale, but putting this laptop’s display beside a personal 1080p monitor showed similar colors.

For anyone in need of a simple laptop to use a web browser and stream the occasional video for school or work, this display will be perfectly fine. But if your job or your school courses necessitate a color-accurate, rich display, you might want to steer clear of the IdeaPad Slim 3i.

Comfortable, Intuitive Keyboard

The IdeaPad Slim 3i’s backlit keyboard is comfortable to type on, with the soft rubber material under each key providing a quiet typing encounter that also delivers subtle feedback with every keypress. This typing encounter may not be for everyone, but if you’re typing in class or in a coffee shop, the quiet key-clacking will be welcome.

Plus, after performing three 60-second typing tests via monkeytype.com on both my daily driver laptop and Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 3i, the latter came out on top. My average typing speed on my Lenovo Yoga 9i was 97.3 words per minute (wpm), with 96% accuracy. On the IdeaPad Slim 3i, my average typing speed was 102.3 wpm, with 96.7% accuracy.

appreciate most 15.6-inch laptops, the IdeaPad Slim 3i features a 10-key number pad on the right side, which is extremely helpful for budgeting, working on math problems, or any other task that requires typing lots of numbers. As someone who’s used to typing on a more compact keyboard, I kept accidentally reaching a bit too far for the backspace key and hitting the number lock key, but that was the only typing hiccup I encountered.

The trackpad is slightly off-centered from the entire keyboard, placed right below the space bar, and is a bit small. Although the trackpad placement looks odd, it wasn’t a nuisance while using the laptop. Navigating with the trackpad was smooth, and both right- and left-clicking never gave me any issues.

Performance: More Than Enough Power for the Average User

With a 13th Gen Intel Core i3-1315U processor, Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, and 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 provides plenty of speedy and efficient performance power for basic tasks, appreciate managing your emails, researching something online with multiple tabs open at once, and playing a video in the background while you work.

I used Chrome to evaluate the laptop’s performance prowess, as this is the most popular (and RAM-heavy) browser, and many people only utilize tools within a browser on their laptops. With 32 tabs open—consisting of two active YouTube videos, 15 tabs from one website, 13 tabs from another, my email, and an open Google Docs tab—this laptop didn’t stutter.

The fans only kicked up when opening all the tabs, but have otherwise been insanely quiet. When checking the task manager, RAM usage consistently stayed between 90-92% and the CPU usage fluctuated between 12% and 26%. For a budget-friendly laptop utilizing an i3 CPU, this performance is impressive. As I’m typing this up in Google Docs, there’s no stuttering, and the lag when loading a new tab on top of the existing 32 tabs is minimal.

Plus, with 512GB storage and Integrated Intel UHD Graphics, you can even play a few simple games on the IdeaPad Slim 3i, appreciate “Stardew Valley” or “Terraria.” Playing more graphics- or performance-intensive games natively won’t be an enjoyable encounter, but if you want to play more games on a budget-friendly laptop, you can always experiment with cloud gaming.

Webcam, Mic, and Speakers: Expect budget quality

This laptop is equipped with a 1MP 720p HD webcam with a privacy shutter, and it’ll get the job done if you need a webcam for work or school, but it doesn’t look the best. Comparing this to my laptop’s 1080p IR & RGB hybrid webcam, the IdeaPad Slim 3i’s webcam doesn’t pick up color as well, so my red cheeks appear washed out and pale, and small facial details don’t show as easily.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 3i is also equipped with a dual-array microphone that does a good job of eliminating minor background noises. In the microphone evaluate performed at my desk, my voice comes through clearly, and my noisy computer tower fans can’t really be heard.

In general, laptop speakers aren’t the greatest for listening to music, and the IdeaPad Slim 3i’s speakers are below average. This laptop is equipped with Dolby Audio and front-facing speakers, but listening to a song on this laptop left a lot to be desired.

I listened to “Real” by Unprocessed on YouTube across the IdeaPad Slim 3i, my Yoga 9i, my Galaxy S21 Ultra, and my OneOdio A10 headphones. As expected, the headphones provided the best listening encounter, picking up the wavy synth sounds in the song’s beginning, crystal-clear singing and high guitar notes, and nuanced bass notes to fill out the sound.

My Yoga 9i, with its Bowers & Wilkins rotating soundbar, provided a similarly atmospheric listening encounter compared to the budget headphones, but the bass notes disappeared slightly behind the high guitar notes and singing. On my smartphone, the song sounded okay, but it lacked depth because only the high notes were able to come through clearly, and the bass elements to round out the song were missing.

The song didn’t sound great on my smartphone, but it sounded better than on the IdeaPad Slim 3i. When I started playing the song on the Slim 3i, it instantly sounded distorted, making even the high notes and singing sound muddied and static. The laptop struggled to balance the levels correctly, putting the crackly singing front and center and sending instruments to the back. All the atmospheric synth sounds and the bass notes were lost.

Dialogue in movies and TV shows also sounded distorted but didn’t make things unwatchable. The IdeaPad Slim 3i may be a fantastic value overall, but the less-than-okay speakers aren’t fit for listening to music.

Not an All-Day Battery Life

Lenovo estimates that the IdeaPad Slim 3i 15’s 47Wh lithium polymer battery can last for up to 12 hours in between charges. After putting the battery through some basic tests, this assess seems way too lofty for average use.

With the battery at 100%, I turned the screen saver off and set the laptop to never fall asleep to get a more accurate assess. I set the brightness to 50%, set the volume to 60%, and opened up 15 tabs in Chrome, one of which was a YouTube livestream with the video volume set to one notch above muted.

It took 4 hours and 53 minutes for the IdeaPad Slim 3i to drop from 100% to 15%, with the battery saver kicking in at 20%. The laptop was manually put to sleep overnight and lost 4% battery over 8 hours and 55 minutes. Then, draining the laptop from 11% to 2% took 51 minutes, and it automatically shut off at 2% battery.

If you don’t listen to music or stream a video while you’re working, the battery will definitely last longer, but you’d have to really lower the brightness or dampen performance to reach the assess of “up to 12 hours.” Plus, unless you’re working in a dimly lit room or trying to extend your battery life, 50% brightness may not be enough. Bumping brightness up to 70% would result in an even lower battery life than roughly 6 hours.

That said, for many mobile students or workers, 6 hours of unplugged battery life could be plenty, and it’s a decent battery life when you look at the value of the laptop as a whole. Charging the laptop from 2% to 48% only took 39 minutes, so even if the battery life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, at least it doesn’t take long to recharge the laptop.

Should You Buy the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i 15?

If you need a simple laptop that can perform basic tasks on the internet, you should absolutely consider Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 (2023). It’s an affordable 15.6-inch laptop that’s easy to cart around in a backpack, comfortable to type on, and powerful enough to handle a swarm of Chrome tabs.

You should probably avoid the IdeaPad Slim 3i if you want to be able to play more demanding games on your laptop, listen to music through high-quality speakers, have a crisp 1080p webcam, or need a longer-lasting battery life than 6 hours at 50% brightness. Of course, all the features just mentioned will inevitably boost a laptop’s price.