Hasta La Gadget!

The new Lenovo Yoga 910 is an update to the Lenovo Yoga 900 which was launched around the same time last year. At that time, we gave it a 10/10 in our Yoga 900 review because it was a great blend of performance, weight, and price, so it was a great “do it all” laptop in its size and price range. The Lenovo Yoga 910 builds up on this and pushes the concept even further.

Design

Right out of the box, you can see that the industrial design has somewhat evolved. The design is a bit more angular, and that gives it a perception of being thinner, although the overall size and weight of the Yoga 910 are comparable to the Yoga 900. When looking at it from the sides, the difference is even more pronounced, thanks to the metallic finish on the left and right, which looks much more “premium” as it did before.

If you look carefully, you may notice the absence of an SD slot. Lenovo said that people tend to use those less and less. If you happen to need one, it’s something that you should now about. I haven’t used one for a couple of years, so I don’t miss it. I tend to plug my camera (NEX6000) or my phone over USB.

As a Yoga laptop, the Yoga 910 is multimode and capable of swiveling 360 degrees to turn into a tablet-style computer. It’s an extremely useful skill when watching movies in a limited-space environment. The tablet mode is also much better for reading, or sharing a presentation or a slide show with someone else.

There’s one full-size USB 3.0 port, one USB-C 2.0 and one USB-C 3.0. Pretty much everyone in the industry told us that the great USB C switch would happen in 2017, and you can see this coming right now if you pay attention.

Lenovo even has a special model which comes with a Gorilla Glass surface treatment in the back. It looks amazingly good and has several design options. Lenovo says that specific retailers will even have their own designs behind the glass, so there should be enough options to please everyone.

Backlit Keyboard and trackpad

Upon opening the laptop, it looks very similar to the previous version, but a closer look will reveal some keyboard layout changes. As you may know, Lenovo has previously added a column of keys to have dedicated Page Up/Down Home and End buttons. This tactic shrunk the overall keyboard by the width by one key.

This time, Lenovo has come back to a classic layout with those buttons being triggered by CTRL+arrow key, which is more like what people are used to. The general key layout is therefore a bit more spacious and comfortable. If you look below the arrow keys

The trackpad is noticeably bigger than it previously was. I didn’t have something to measure it right away, but if you look at the photos and use the space bar as a reference (I think it hasn’t changed size), you can have a good idea of how bigger the Yoga 910’s trackpad is – larger is better when it comes to touch surfaces.  There’s also a fingerprint reader for quick and secure login – I’ve use a similar one on the Carbon X1, and it is a great feature.

Display

The IPS LCD display measures 13.9” in diagonal and comes in 4K (3840×2160) or HFD (1920×1080). The new display has very thin bezels and looks very nice because of this. One thing that had to change a bit is the webcam location: it now sits at the bottom of the screen. At 323 x 224.5 x 14.3mm (3.04 lbs), the Yoga 910 is definitely in the thin and light category, especially for a 13.9” laptop.

As usual, this YOGA is a multimode device, which means that its display will tilt all the way to 360 degrees and anything in between. Multimode is great for flights, trains, buses and other spots where seating space is sparse. It makes a big difference for me in long haul flights. Having a 360-degree laptop with a thinness of 14.3mm is made possible by Lenovo’s proprietary all-metal hinge.

System performance

The Lenovo Yoga Y910 has a range of options when it comes to Processors, but the top of the line is an Intel Core i7 (Gen7, exact model TBD). The graphics processor is integrated into the Intel CPU, so it will change depending on which you choose. It’s not a “gaming system”, but it can run most games that are not super-demanding.

There’s a maximum of 16GB of RAM, and the PCIe SSD storage can climb to 1TB. This capacity is pretty impressive, but unfortunately not cheap (oh well). Heavy graphics workloads aside, this computer should perform very well and be at the top of what’s possible in this kind of form-factor today.

Conclusion

To conclude with a good surprise, the battery capacity went from 64 Wh to 78Wh. That’s a ~22% increase in battery capacity. Lenovo estimates that the computer can run for ~10.5 hours in UHD and ~15.5 hours in FHD – at least, this is what they are getting with Mobile Mark 2014. In general, we recommend taking these numbers with caution and compare mainly based on battery capacity (given the same hardware platform and OS).

Lenovo Yoga 910: Hands-On Review , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.