Lenovo Yoga 900 review: A big power boost for Lenovo’s ultra-slim Windows 10 laptop

Lenovo has been making great hybrids since the dawn of time, but rather than lithely bending over backwards, its Yoga 3 Pro fell flat. Hamstrung by a sluggish Core M processor and unremarkable battery life, even its novel “watchband hinge” wasn’t able to rescue it from mediocrity. Now, however, its successor is here, and the Lenovo Yoga 900 looks like it might just make amends.

Lenovo Yoga 900 review: Design

Externally, Lenovo hasn’t done much to change the recipe. The laptop is still ultra-thin – the “thinnest Core i convertible laptop”, according to the company – and Lenovo has stuck to its guns with the ostentatious watchband hinge. That’s a good thing, too, since that was one of the previous model’s strengths.

The hinge is constructed from 812 interlinking pieces of aluminium and steel, and just like last year’s model, all the tiny links work together to provide enough resistance to make a very effective hinge. As with all of Lenovo’s convertible laptop designs, it also allows the laptop to be posed in a number of different positions – contorting all the way from laptop to tablet and everywhere in between – but the weight remains a very reasonable 1.29kg.

There have been a couple of small changes to the overall design. The hinge is now colour-coded to match the chassis (the laptop is available in orange, gold and silver), and the hinge mechanism itself has been refined, delivering a smoother opening and closing action than on last year’s model. It’s a highly impressive feat of engineering, even if not everyone will find it especially pretty to look at. To my mind, it’s more peculiar-looking than cutting-edge.

Elsewhere, in place of the rubber carbon fibre-effect plastic surrounding the keyboard and touchpad of last year, the Yoga 900’s palm rest is now clad in real leather. Not that you’d notice: it is a touch softer and warmer when you rest your wrists on it, but it’s indistinguishable from textured plastic until you actually touch it. And what will it look like after a couple of years’ use? Scruffy, probably, rather like my long-suffering wallet.

In more practical-minded changes, the touchpad of the original has been enlarged, following criticism that the Yoga Pro 3’s was too small, and the function key row has been reintroduced along the top of the keyboard. The laptop has no native video output port this time around, but you do get a USB Type-C connector, which can output a video signal via an adapter. Frustratingly, Lenovo doesn’t include one in the box, although it has at least resisted the temptation to use the Type-C port to power the laptop. As with last year, the Yoga 900 charges up via a dual-purpose USB socket.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 900 review: Performance and battery life

While those refinements are all well and good, there are more important upgrades afoot here, and they address the big problem we had with last year’s Yoga 3 Pro: performance. Where that laptop was only able to muster a lowly Intel Core M processor, and one that suffered from horrible throttling issues at that, the new version goes right up to Core i7, and it comes with the very latest Skylake generation of processors. The Yoga 900’s chassis has had to expand by a couple of millimetres to accommodate the processor’s extra heat output, but the increase in power is dramatic.

Currently, only one model is available in the UK, and this is the fully-loaded Yoga 900. This machine has a 2.5GHz Core i7-6500U Skylake processor, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, and the 13.3in touchscreen sports a pixel-perfect 3,200 x 1,800 resolution. As you’d expect, this all makes for a very quick, luxurious-feeling laptop. Windows 10 flies along, while boot and restart times are quick thanks to the SSD.

It’s not all fantastic news, however. Lenovo has made a big deal of the Yoga 900’s new cooling system, and while the pair of fans do a decent job of quietly expelling hot air, overall performance lags behind similarly specified rivals. The Dell XPS 13, for instance, has exactly the same processor and half the RAM, yet proved 10% quicker in our video transcoding tests, and 16% faster in the demanding multi-tasking section of our benchmarks.

It turns out the Yoga 900 has inherited one of its predecessors traits: CPU throttling. Push the processor hard and, after a spike of activity at full speed, the clock speed starts to oscillate up and down every ten seconds or so, varying between 2GHz and 2.7Ghz as it butts up against its (presumably thermal) limits. The CPU doesn’t get especially hot – I saw peaks no higher than 76℃ – but the throttling clearly has an effect on the overall performance in benchmarks. Whether this will have an impact in everyday use depends entirely on what applications you’re using, though.

One big improvement, at least on paper, is a significantly larger battery. This year, the Lenovo Yoga 900 has a 66Wh battery, which compared with the Yoga 3 Pro’s 44Wh battery is a full 50% higher in capacity. The result is very decent battery life. With screen brightness set to 50%, the Yoga 900 kept playing full-screen video for 11hrs 26mins before giving up the ghost.

Lenovo Yoga 900 review: Display

As you’d expect for a high-end laptop, the Lenovo Yoga 900’s display has more pixels than you can shake an impossibly tiny stick at. The 13.3in touchscreen sports a resolution of 3,200 x 1,800, and is crisp enough for even the most discerning of eyes. It looks lovely: bright, crisp and colourful in all the right ways.

After spending a little more time with the Yoga 900, however, I began to notice that the display isn’t quite as good as its rivals. There’s no problem with brightness – it reaches a respectable maximum of 341cd/m2 – but contrast is dire, with our X-Rite colorimeter recording a contrast ratio of only 454:1.

That’s not great compared to its rivals that routinely exceed 1,000:1, and this results in images losing out noticeably in terms of punchiness and shadow detail. Fire up a moodily lit movie – anything with “Batman” in the title, for instance – and the Yoga 900 struggles to eke out the detail you’ll see on the Dell XPS 13 or the 13in Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Colours look pretty good, it has to be said, but even here the Lenovo is a little off the pace. The display covers 89.6% of the sRGB colour gamut, meaning colours aren’t quite as rich and saturated as the Dell XPS 13, which reproduces a wider 95%. To the Lenovo Yoga 900’s credit, colour accuracy is a touch more consistent than on the Dell XPS 13, which suffers due to its dynamic contrast, but most people are unlikely to notice that. Overall, it’s the lower contrast that’s most noticeable, and you don’t need expert eyes to see the difference.

Lenovo Yoga 900 review: Keyboard, touchpad and connectivity

I’ve lost count of the number of laptops that have aced every possible category and then fallen to pieces at the final hurdle, and the Yoga 900 is another to add to the list. The keyboard isn’t awful, but it’s not even close to the best at this price. The keys have very little travel, and aren’t pleasant to type on, and some of my biggest bugbears – not least the decision to chop the right Shift key in half to make room for big cursor keys – are in evidence. Yes, Lenovo has now added a row of Function keys, but frankly I’d swap those for a keyboard that was a better all-rounder.

And no, the buttonless touchpad isn’t great either. The touchpad is still too small, and although it depresses with a nice clean click, it often just doesn’t do anything. When you have to make multiple attempts to click an onscreen icon, or bring up a context menu with a two-fingered tap, then something’s very, very wrong.

Connectivity saves the day – partially, at least. Lenovo’s decision to employ a power connector that doubles as a USB 2 port remains welcome, and there are a further two USB 3 ports – one on each edge. Another tiny bonus? The Lenovo’s charger uses a detachable USB cable, so you can use it to charge other USB devices at a pinch. Meanwhile, a USB Type-C port takes the place of the micro-HDMI on the previous model, so you will need to shell out for some compatible adapters. Unsurprisingly, no video adapters are included in the box.

Wireless connections include 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4, which is all well and good, but I noticed some tiresome bugs with our review unit, which included a tendency to refuse to detect wireless networks upon waking from sleep. The only solution? Restart the computer. You can expect this to be fixed ASAP, but it takes the sheen off what’s meant to be a luxury device.

Lenovo Yoga 900 review: Verdict

The Lenovo Yoga 900 is a significant improvement over last year’s disappointing Yoga 3 Pro. There’s only one, tiny little problem: Lenovo’s rivals have also made huge strides forward since last year, and this leaves the Lenovo Yoga 900 with some catching up to do.

I’ve no issue with the Yoga 900’s super-flexible design. It flits effortlessly from giant tablet to slimline laptop, without the bulk associated with most such designs – but its limber attitude can’t make amends for its flaws. The keyboard is merely acceptable, the touchpad still too small, and the display is middle-of-the-road. For a £1,300 laptop, that just won’t wash.

If you want a superb Windows ultraportable, then I have one simple piece of advice: buy the Dell XPS 13 instead. If you primarily want a tablet, then go get a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. Sorry, Lenovo, you did good, but you’re going to need to do better.

See also: The best laptops for 2015/16 – your ultimate guide