Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga: A Yoga Dressed For Business
Performance Summary and Conclusion
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The ThinkPad Yoga is essentially an interesting product; it represents an effort to give business users a prettier and (literally) more flexible notebook--or to give average users a slightly more robust version of the Yoga experience, we suppose. As the former, it succeeds. You get the great multimode options to accommodate travel and presentation situations and the slightly more svelte chassis of a Yoga. But Lenovo slapped on the excellent business-class, spill-proof keyboard of a ThinkPad and included the very handy stylus. It’s also built to withstand a lot of abuse. Altogether, the above makes the ThinkPad Yoga very well suited for business environments.
We’re not enamored with all of the included software, and for as great as the stylus option is, the little pen can become tedious for some of us to use, for those with even average-sized hands. Another small knock on the ThinkPad Yoga is the relatively weak audio performance, though that's not something you'd expect front and center in a business-class device. Further, although Lenovo was quite clever to come up with the Lift ‘n’ Lock keyboard to protect the device when in multimode configurations, we're a little queasy about resting machine square on its keyboard at times. Finally, although it's perhaps a minor shortcoming, we were also disappointed to see that there's no Ethernet jack, where business travelers might be more apt to use this method of connectivity.
The ThinkPad Yoga we tested here isn’t cheap at about $1,000, but considering that the ThinkPad T440s (as configured when tested) comes in at $1,309, the new Yoga is a relatively good deal--especially compared to something like the Dell Latitude E7440 that can cost upwards of $1,150.
Too often when companies roll out a tweener product like this, there are too many compromises and the product ends up unappealing as a whole. That’s not the case with the ThinkPad Yoga; for what they were trying to accomplish, Lenovo hit the nail on the head with this machine.
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