Earlier this year Lenovo announced it was developing a new Yoga 5G thin and light laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 processor and 5G connectivity. Now the company has revealed that the Lenovo Yoga 5G 2021 goes up for pre-order in China on April 30 for 9999 CNY (about $1540).
But if that price seems too steep, it turns out that’s just one of three new Windows on Snapdragon laptops with cellular connectivity launching in China next week.
The new Lenovo IdeaPad 5G has similar specs, but a simpler design and a lower starting price of 6,999 CNY ($1080), while the Lenovo IdeaPad 4G 14M is a 4999 CNY ($770) version with a Snapdragon 8c chip and 4G LTE support.
As you can probably guess from the price differences, the Lenovo Yoga 5G 2021 is a premium model with a few features to help set it apart including a touchscreen display, 360-degree hinge for a convertible tablet-style design, a fingerprint sensor for biometric security, and this model has the largest battery of the new laptops. Interestingly, it does not have the fastest storage though.
Specs for the Yoga 5G 2021 include:
- 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel 400-nit display
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 processor
- 8GB LPDDR4X memory
- 512GB UFS 3.0 storage
- 60 Wh battery
- Stereo 2W speakers
- 2 x USB Type-C ports
- 3.5mm audio jack
The laptop measures 14.7mm (0.58 inches) thick and weighs 1.35kg (2.98 pounds).
Moving down the line, the Lenovo IdeaPad 14 5G 2021 has the same processor and memory, and it also has a 14 inch full HD display. But there are a few key differences between this model and the Yoga 5G.
It’s not a convertible, it has a smaller battery, and I don’t see any mention of a fingerprint reader on the Lenovo China website. But this model is lighter, has faster storage, and features a USB Type-A port.
Lenovo IdeaPad 14 5G specs include:
- 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 processor
- 8GB LPDDR4X memory
- 512GB NVMe storage
- 51 Wh battery
- Stereo 2W speakers
- 2 x USB Type-C ports
- 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
- 3.5mm audio jack
The laptop is 14.9mm (0.59 inches) thick and weighs 1.23kg (2.71 pounds).
And then the closest Lenovo has to a budget model is the Lenovo IdeaPad 4G 2021 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8c processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD.
For the most part this model is identical to the IdeaPad 14 5G, except it has a less powerful processor, a lower price tag, and a slightly more compact design – it weighs just 1.22kg (2.69 pounds).
There’s no word on if or when any of these laptops will be available outside of China.
Those seem like really nice devices that unfortunately are priced higher than they should be by about 2x. A snapdragon 8cx is nice but given a lot of applications will need x86 emulation performance isn’t there to justify these price tags. Makes me wonder how much qualcomm charge for the chips and how long it’ll be before mediatek and rockchip get in on the action. There are mediatek chromebooks out there that’re pretty cheap, is no one going to try shipping windows on arm on those?
Given how much of a pain in the rear it is to port an operating system to your typical ARM device compared to any x86 PC, I would imagine no one is going to try that.
It might happen if there were some kind of industry standard for ARM firmware, but giving the end user the ability to install whatever OS they wanted would threaten potential future profits (namely ad revenue) in other ways.