Microsoft Education launches four budget laptops; two from Lenovo

Microsoft has announced the launch of four new Windows 10 laptops that are aimed at students. Besides this, the company also announced its plans of giving free access to Office 365 Education to school teachers in 146 countries across the world. Lastly, it also announced several developments for STEM; such as a new curricula for Computer Science with Minecraft, partnerships for Mixed Reality headsets, as well as a new Chemistry update.

To start with the laptops, Microsoft has unveiled four new laptops. Out of which, two are made by Lenovo, while two are from JP. Targeted at school students, the starting price of the Lenovo range is just $189 (approximately Rs. 12,100) for the Lenovo 100e. It comes with an 11.6-inch HD anti-glare display with the screen resolution of 1366×768 pixels.

The Lenovo 100e laptop is driven by an Intel Celeron Apollo Lake processor, which is teamed up with a minimum of 2GB LPDDR4 RAM. The device is said to deliver a battery life of up to 10 hours, and it weighs 1.22 kg.

The Lenovo 300e 2-in-1 convertible PC is a part of the Microsoft Education range as well. This laptop is fitted with an 11.6-inch HD 10-point multi-touch display with the screen resolution of 1366×768 pixels. Powered by an Intel Pentium processor, it packs a minimum of 4GB LPDDR4 RAM and a minimum of 16GB eMMC storage. The laptop offers a battery life of up to 8 hours and its starting price is $279 (approximately Rs. 17,800).

The other two laptops in the Microsoft Education range are manufactured by JP. The Classmate Leap T303 laptop featuring Windows Hello support carries a starting price tag of $199 (approximately Rs. 12,700). While the Trigono V401 2-in-1 has a starting price of $299 (approximately Rs. 19,100). The latter ships with a pen and touch support.

As stated earlier, Microsoft also announced that it would extend free access to Office 365 to teachers in 146 countries. Save for that, several new education-focused updates will be rolled out to Microsoft Office in the coming month. The updates will bring Microsoft Learning Tools using which students will get to improve their comprehension skills.