When it comes to laptops, Lenovo are famous for their Yoga line of ultra portable convertible laptops and it’s easy to see why. Their super slim profiles, impressive battery life and form-defying capabilities make them extremely impressive pieces of kit and this remains true for their Yoga 900S convertible laptop.
Build Quality
First thing you notice when you start playing with the new Yoga is just how light it is. Its lightweight and balanced designed makes this laptop great for anyone who’s on the go all the time and the extremely sturdy watchband hinge means it won’t be opening itself up in your bag or suitcase. It’s just half an inch thick and weights just shy of 1kg which is also very impressive.
The textured keyboard deck and sides host a USB 2.0 port that doubles as the notebook’s power port. There’s USB 3.0 Type-C for speed transfers, another USB 2.0 port and a headphone jack. The power button is on the notebook’s right edge.
The keyboard deck itself is black and has a nice textured finish, the trackpad, unfortunately is on the small side but is quite responsive. The keyboard itself is well laid out but we’d like a bit more travel as it’s quite shallow to type on.
The Yoga also boasts a 12.5-inch QHD display with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. Because that display has a glossy finish, you can expect glare. It can be configured with as much as 256GB of solid state storage and 8GB of RAM. There’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a 720P web camera.
As with all Yoga laptops, you can also spin the display 360 degrees around back on itself to create a tablet like device with its 10 point touch display which worked great during our time testing the device.
Performance
Internally, the Intel Core M7 processor and 8 GB of RAM make it possible to multitask very effectively on this device. We didn’t experience any lag when carrying out every day tasks like creating and editing documents and browsing the web but you won’t be playing the latest blockbuster games on here as it just doesn’t have the horsepower but that’s to be expected of a laptop this light and thin.
Using the Yoga 900S in its tablet form factor also worked very well and we found the screen to be very responsive and had no issue navigating Windows 10. We do wish the max brightness level was a bit higher though as it’s noticeably darker than the likes of a Macbook Pro’s max brightness.
Battery Life
Lenovo claims that the Yoga 900S battery can last for 10.5 hours between charges when playing HD video at 200nits. We didn’t actually this these exact conditions out but we did find the device lasting well into the evening after a day of moderate to heavy use and that, in our books, is a very impressive feat for such a compact laptop.
Understandably, if you’re using it with the brightness up full and carrying out processor intensive tasks, you mightn’t get as much out of the battery but overall we were very impressed with how it performed.
Conclusion
Overall, we enjoyed our time with the Lenovo Yoga 900S. It’s extremely light and compact design, impressive Intel M performance and long lasting battery make it a very enticing package. We only wish the trackpad was slightly larger and the keyboard had more travel but aside from these issues, we would definitely recommend the Yoga 900S for anyone looking for an ultra-portable convertible Windows laptop.
The Lenovo Yoga 900S has an RRP of €1,299.99 and is available from Lenovo.ie
