Lenovo Launches Ideapad Yoga 13

Even Lenovo's lineup is all over the place. There's the Lynx convertible, which transforms from laptop to tablet. The Twist rotates and folds, and looks like the X Series tablets we've seen for years. And then there's the IdeaPad Yoga, perhaps the most enticing of the bunch — we've been waiting for this device to come out ever since it was announced at CES back in January. The Yoga's crazy gimmick is its hinge, which allows the screen to fold all the way back over the keyboard, so you can hold your laptop like a tablet.


Design:

The Yoga's a fairly innocuous ultrabook. The matte gray machine's black sides, slightly rounded and sloped corners, and undecorated exterior definitely won't catch your eye on a store shelf, but that's not necessarily a bad thing — it's nice-looking in a simple sort of way. At three and a half pounds and two-thirds of an inch thick, it's just a middle-of-the-road ultrabook. It's noticeably heavier and larger than a MacBook Air.

On the right side of the Yoga (if you're using it like a laptop — as you'll see, "sides" are all very fungible with this device) sit a full-size SD card slot, a USB 2.0 port, and the blocky yellow jack for the power adapter.The one and only USB 3.0 port rests on the left, next to an HDMI port and the headphone jack. The power button is on the front, and there are physical volume controls on the left side.

If you never felt the desire to test the integrity of the Yoga's hinge, you might never know the device's most impressive trick and thus always wonder why in the world this thing is called the Yoga. But if you open the clamshell, and push the screen back, and back, and back, you'll figure it out. The screen can rotate a full 360 degrees (minus however many separate one side of the base from the other), creating a bunch of different ways to use this device. You can rotate it all the way around, flip the thing around and hold it like a tablet with the screen facing you and the keys underneath your fingers on the back.

You can also use the keyboard tray as a stand for the display, as if the screen were mounted to the front of the base rather than the back. The hinge is sturdy enough to hold in almost any position, so anything you can think of you can probably pull off.On one hand, it's all a bit of a gimmick. Flipping it around so it's "closed" with the screen facing out does make the Yoga much more like a tablet — a huge, giant, unwieldy tablet — but in every other setup it's still a screen and a stand. But there's something different when you can't see the keyboard — the screen doesn't feel so far away.

DISPLAY:

The Yoga's screen is relatively uninteresting. It's a good display, to be sure — the 13.3-inch IPS panel's 1600 x 900 resolution is a notch above many ultrabooks, and its color reproduction and brightness are both as good as I'd expect. But it pales next to the 1080p screens on the Asus Zenbook Prime and a few others, especially when you use it as a tablet. 1600 x 900 is more than adequate at a typical laptop distance — and 1080p might even be too high in some cases, making everything on the screen seem tiny — but when you hold the screen closer to your face every pixel really counts.The only problem with the screen was its touch response: the Yoga seemed to miss a few more taps and swipes than I'd normally expect. It also occasionally registered taps when I meant to swipe, and swipes when I meant to tap.


KEYBOARD AND TRACKPAD:

Since this is an IdeaPad and not a ThinkPad, there are a couple of key accoutrements missing. There's no red TrackPoint nipple, and no separate, clickable mouse buttons — personally I don't miss either, but if you're a TrackPoint devotee that might be a dealbreaker. Instead you get a sleek, all-black tray with a clickpad and six rows of full-size keys.

Both are more like a ThinkPad than not, and that's a great thing. The keyboard uses the same "smile" design we saw on the X1 Carbon and elsewhere — the slightly concave keys are comfortable to use, easy to get used to, and have just the right amount of travel and feedback. The only problem is the layout: the right-side Shift and Backspace keys are half their normal size, and I found myself accidentally hitting = and / a lot. The Home, End, PgUp / Dn keys take up the right-most column on the keyboard, and it throws off the alignment of the keyboard .

The trackpad's a mixed bag. Its surface is smooth and glassy.Two-finger scrolling works, but sometimes takes a couple of swipes to kick in — it's like it needs to warm up before it's ready to scroll. It does scroll both vertically and horizontally, though, which is great for moving around the Start screen and Windows 8 apps.

Performance:

The Yoga's even a vaguely usable gaming machine, which is leaps and bounds better than I can say for most ultrabooks. Older games like Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X play relatively smoothly, and even newer games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which cripples most ultrabooks, was at least decently playable at native resolution and low settings — though by no means should you mistake this for a competitor to an actual gaming rig.

There were some odd performance issues, though, which like the trackpad serve as all-too-frequent reminders that Microsoft has a lot of tweaking left to do with Windows 8. The Yoga sometimes wouldn't reconnect to a Wi-Fi network when it resumed from sleep, even though it saw a known network; otherwise-stable apps also crashed a few more times .

Battery Back Up:

The Yoga's fans kick in basically any time you touch the computer — it doesn't take much for them to start whirring. Most of the time it's really quiet, though, and you'll only notice it in a silent room — plus, the machine barely gets warm unless you're cranking through The Witcher 2, and if some slight fan noise is the tradeoff I'll take it. When you're gaming or using a heavy app like Photoshop, though, the fan blasts hot air out the back at a pretty high volume.

Final Review:

 If you ignore its awesome transformational abilities — which are a pretty great addition to a laptop, and are implemented really well — the IdeaPad Yoga 13 is just an average, pretty good laptop. It has a good keyboard, a nice-looking screen, and competent performance. It also has a frustrating trackpad, though, and a touchscreen that doesn't work as well as it should. It's a perfectly good laptop, and that's about what I expect for a $1,000 ultrabook.