Lenovo’s Yoga 920 is a convertible notebook with a 13.9 inch touchscreen display, a 360-degree watchband-style hinge, a thin and light body, and a slim-bezel design that makes it smaller than you’d expect a 14 inch laptop to be.
It’s a really nice looking machine… but it’s not particularly cheap. Lenovo’s currently charging $1200 and up for the Yoga 920, although you can probably save a few bucks by shopping at Best Buy instead.
I got a chance to spend a few minutes with a Yoga 920 featuring a 4K display, and here are a few thoughts.
When it comes to laptop/tablet hybrids, I tend to prefer models with a built-in keyboard, because they tend to be easier to use in laptop mode than models with detachable keyboard covers. Some machines, like the Microsoft Surface Book and the (now pretty much defunct) Asus Transformer Book split the difference by offering hard keyboards instead of softer keyboard covers. But a machine with a 360-degree hinge means you don’t have to struggled to use the notebook on your lap and you’ll never accidentally leave the keyboard at home (unless you leave the whole laptop at home).
But a lot of 360-degree models are a bit thick and/or heavy to use as a tablet. At about 0.55 inches thick and just over 3 pounds, the Yoga 920 is neither. I mean, it’s a little heavy for one-handed use, but given its nearly 14 inch display, odds are that you were going to hold this thing with two hands anyway.
The backlit keyboard has a nice feel to it, although it took me a second to notice that the keys were actually backlit since the demo unit I was looking at was sitting right under a bright light.
The watchband-style hinge helps keep the notebook thin, while feeling sturdy enough to let you type without much screen wobbling. And the 3840 x 2160 pixel IPS display looked great, although you’ll probably want to adjust the Windows display scaling settings if you get the high-res model (the default seems to be 300% scaling).
There is a downside to going with the 4K version: Lenovo says you should get around 15.5 hours of battery life with a 1080p version of the laptop. That number drops to 10.5 hours for the 4K model. And it’s always a good idea to take manufacturers’ battery life claims as an optimistic estimate, so real-world performance is likely to be lower.
Lenovo’s entry-level model has a Core i58250U processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of PCIe storage. Higher-priced models support 512GB or 1TB of solid state storage, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to a Core i7-8550U processor.
The Bluetooth active pen can be purchased separately or in a bundle with some models. ANd each version has a 4 cell, 70 Whr battery.
When you are lying on your back a laptop is easier to use than a tablet as it *feels* less heavy as you can balance it on your chest and it is easier to achieve that balance point. With a tablet the balance point is harder to achieve so it eventually feel heavy. Also the physical keyboard allows you to raise the screen to a better viewing angle.
The current trend of 13-14 inch laptops with 4k displays running off anemic Intel Graphics is pretty lousy for the price these things are going for. Oh and a meager 256 GB SSD for anything above $1k these days is nothing short of extortion.
That and hopefully Lenovo has improved the generic robustness and quality of their non-ThinkPad models, I have a 2 year-old Yoga 3 that’s had display dimming and input issues that weren’t apparently addressed in following models.
Not bad.
The higher specced model seems like a good candidate for a beefy Gaming Console, by hooking up the ThunderBolt 3 ports to an external GPU box like the AKiTiO Node.
So there’s no middle-resolution option anymore? No, 1440p or 1800p screens?
I found them to be less useful than 4K, but they did scale Windows much much better. And offered a comparably high pixel density, like a modern phone. I can see the pixel outlines on 1080p laptop screens, which is off-putting coming from a phone… basically my only gripe with 1080p screens.
However, something tells me the overall battery life will be subpar and the sunlight legibility would be atrocious…. not to mention the amount of fingerprints on that glossy plastic.
I agree about wanting a 1440p screen, it really is a sweet-spot. I’m definitely okay with 1080, I will gladly buy laptops with 1080. But if I’m paying for a higher resolution screen, I would lean towards 1440, and I would only spend more money if it was a higher colour accuracy screen.
4K is a bit too high for some programs. I definitely do not want a 3200×1800 screen, the only panels in production use a Pentile RGBW subpixel setup. It means it has less RGB subpixels than normal, and colour reproduction suffers.
Cheers for the info!