Lenovo’s tiny Chromebox Micro has a unique hidden power

Lenovo’s super-compact Chromebox Micro has finally arrived at our office, and let me tell you, this little thing is wild. Remember all that hype about it being pocket-sized? Lenovo wasn’t kidding. As soon as it arrived, I snatched it out of the box and immediately slid it into my front jeans pocket – no problem! But the Lenovo Chromebox Micro has another unique trick up its sleeve: it can be powered by a portable battery pack.

After the fun of putting this Chromebox in my pocket, we started going through the box and realized that the included charger was 45W USB-C and not a standard barrel charger that we normally see on a Chromebox. So, we quickly dug out a RAVPower portable power bank, and, to our surprise, it booted up and worked flawlessly! We’ve seen this work on Chromebooks before but most Chromeboxes require a barrel charger to boot up, so this was a first.

Most of the time, you wouldn’t want to carry around a normal Chromebox and barrel charger but the super-compact nature of the Micro makes me think there could be some unique and different use cases for this device. And now that we know it can be run off a portable power bank, it opens the door to all kinds of ways you might use the device.

Suddenly, a portable ChromeOS setup with some unique peripherals could make sense. I know this would be a little bleeding edge but you could pair this with a set of those AR glasses and a small keyboard/mouse to create a futuristic mobile workstation. Of course, the Chromebox Micro doesn’t have an internal battery so you are going to be limited by the capacity of the battery pack but still, this could be a whole new way to get productive without being chained to the desk. And yes, at some point, you might be better off just having a Chromebook that has all the pieces you need in one, but I do think there are some interesting use cases for this (now portable) Chromebox. You can hear us talk through a few of them on this week’s episode of The Chrome Cast podcast.

You can currently purchase the Lenovo Chromebox Micro at B&H with and without a Chrome Management Console for $239 and $389 respectively. As is the case with many Chromebox and Chromebook announcements, B&H created some confusion by “discontinuing” one listing and then creating a new listing. But it looks like the non-management device is now in stock and shipping. So, if you’re interested in testing out this Chromebox for yourself, you can now snag one at B&H.

We’re only beginning to test out all the crazy things we can do with the Chromebox Micro so stay tuned for more updates on our experiments. In the meantime, I’m dying to know – what has you so excited about this pocket-sized Chromebox? What cool use cases do you see for it? Send us an email or let us know over on X. I’d love to hear from you!