LENOVO YOGA 900-13ISK

From £1,299 inc VAT • lenovo.com/uk

The big news among laptops CPUs in 2015 was the Intel Core M, a brain so small and efficient that it allows machines such as the MacBook 12in to offer levels of performance similar to those of an Intel Core i5 system. The Lenovo Yoga 900 flips things around again. This is a slim, light laptop with a flippy screen and a long-lasting battery. But it also has a full Intel Core i7 processor. It’s like last year’s Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro with a six pack.

Price

Make no mistake, though, the Lenovo Yoga 900 is no bargain laptop. It’s more expensive than the similar but less powerful Yoga 3 Pro, starting at £1,199 for the Core i5 version and moving swiftly up to £1,500 when you upgrade to a Core i7 CPU and increase storage.

Design

When you see a Lenovo laptop bearing the ‘Yoga’ name, it tells you all you need to know about its key design feature. The Yoga 900 has a special hinge that lets the screen flip around 360 degrees, so that the display sits flat on the back of the keyboard.

Before you use a laptop like this, it’s easy to dismiss the thing as a gimmick, and think you wouldn’t want to use a tablet weighing more than a kilogram. However, it’s the angles in between that matter most. As the Yoga 900 hinge can sit at just about any angle, it can turn the display into a shallow-footprint touchscreen PC, an impromptu TV or a tablet that stays at just the right angle as you laze on the sofa. This Lenovo uses the same style of ‘watch’ hinge that we saw in the Yoga 3 Pro. It’s made of 800-plus pieces and looks fantastic. As the Watch monicker suggests, it design is inspired by stainless steel watch straps.

It is similar to the one used in the Microsoft Surface Book (page 16), spreading the tension across more than the usual two connection points you get with a bog-standard laptop hinge to make the mechanism steady, while keeping its motion easy and smooth.

You could argue that Microsoft’s take on the idea is a bit more cohesive, though. In making the hinge a different colour from the rest of the laptop and deliberately exposing its workings, some might think that the Yoga 900 is a bit showy.

Build Features Performance

Value