Lenovo Yoga 700 Review: A Flexible 14-Inch Ultraportable Convertible

With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft effectively encouraged its hardware partners to think beyond the confines of traditional PC design, giving them the nudge they needed to introduce bold new products. Lenovo embraced the challenge, and in 2012 it brought its first Yoga system to market, a multi-mode laptop that could fold back onto itself like a carnival contortionist.

The design proved popular, so over the past few years Lenovo has added new laptops to its Yoga line. One of the newest is the Yoga 700, a 14-inch convertible that takes advantage of the latest technologies, pairing Intel's Skylake architecture with Microsoft's Windows 10 platform. It's a marriage of hardware and software made flexible through the Yoga's familiar ability to assume different modes.


Therein lies the beauty of the Yoga 700. At its core, the Yoga 700 is a laptop like any number of other ultraportable on the market, But it can also assume the role of tablet by bending the display all the way back on its keyboard. And in between those two modes are two other options—stand mode for watching movies or video chatting with relatives, and a tent mode that's ideal for touch input, like scrolling through a recipe on the kitchen counter or cycling through a playlist of songs.

Lenovo's Yoga 700 is the fourth generation of the Yoga line and it's available in four different configurations on the company's website. The model we have in for evaluation is a special SKU for Best Buy stores where it normally sells for $900 (on sale for $800 at the time of this writing). It has the same specs as the $900 80QD00BWUS model on Lenovo's web store, including an Intel Core i5-6200U dual-core processor, 8GB of DDR3L 1600MHz RAM, and a 256GB solid state drive—not a shabby foundation for a sub-$1,000 machine.