Lenovo Yoga 900 Review: Brains, Beauty, and Brawn

Progress is a wonderful thing, and if you're in the market for either a high-end tablet or a highly portable laptop, you're in luck. Intel's 6th Generation Skylake processors and advances in memory and storage allow the Yoga 900 to offer excellent performance in a very small form factor. And Windows 10 is equally at home running desktop applications as it is operating as a tablet OS. 

Our benchmarks show that this system powers through light gaming, entertainment, and everyday tasks in a manner that hasn't been possible before with machines of this size, stature, and cost. Outside of hardcore gamers, it's tough to think of a buying segment that would be disappointed at the performance of the Yoga 900. Toss in the added flexibility that comes by way of the watchband hinge, that allows the machine to be used in multiple modes (tablet, tent, stand, etc.), and the value proposition gets even better.


The Yoga 900 is rigid, svelte, and built for the usual abuses associated with the road. It's offers an interesting mix of edgy and classy looks, with bolder, more modern finishes, coupled to a fairly traditional keyboard and display arrangement. The watchband hinge system continues to impress, as it did on last year's Yoga 3 Pro, offering a fantastic folding mechanism that can easily switch from laptop to tablet and back again. The keyboard, by and large, is satisfactory, save for a few keys being placed in unusual positions. The touch panel is remarkably responsive too, as you'd expect, and the 13.3-inch QHD+ display is top notch.


All in all, the Yoga 900 hits all of the marks it should. The baseline machine is priced sensibly, and given that it includes 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD, it's one of the few entry level machine we'd be comfortable recommending. Granted, doubling the RAM and SSD will enable the Yoga 900 to breathe a bit more easily, but kudos to Lenovo for selling a starter machine that isn't hamstrung.

The Lenovo Yoga 900 offers excellent performance, an interesting and attractive design language, good battery life, and practical features at an affordable price point. There's not much more you can ask for in a convertible in this class...