Lenovo Yoga 11 710

£549 inc VAT • lenovo.com/uk

The Lenovo Yoga 11 710 has been designed with a specific purpose. It wants to offer the best, most convenient ultraportable laptop experience you can get without spending a scary amount of money. It has a 360-degree hinge and a touchscreen, making it more useful while you’re out of the office.

Design

This is a laptop that’s as small as you’d want to use for real work, rather than the household admin you might do on a Sunday morning. It is, of course, worth mentioning at this point that Lenovo offers a 14in version of the 710 that costs £100 more. It has an Intel Core i5-6200U processor, 8GB of RAM and a full HD screen, but is in every other respect a bigger version of the 11in model on review here.

There are, however, great benefits to using the 11in Lenovo, particularly if you spend a lot of time dashing between airports, cafes or meetings with a laptop in your bag. It weighs just 1.06kg, and is slim enough to fit in just about anywhere you’d have space for an iPad in a carry case. The allure of the Yoga 11 710 is that it has this level of portability, and a high-end design, without a price anywhere near £1,000.

Like other Yoga models, it has a hinge that flips all the way around, turning it into a thick, heavy tablet. It doesn’t compare too well with an iPad or dedicated Android tablet, but this setup can be useful when a normal tablet isn’t. It’ll let you prop the tablet up in bed, let you read an article easily while you cook, and will keep the screen upright on a tiny table. You’d need a folio case to get the same effect with a normal tablet, and it may well feel a lot flimsier.

Each design of hybrid has a distinct appeal and the Lenovo’s 360-degree hinge style leaves you with a device that still feels like a laptop. Others struggle with weight balance because their brains, and at least part of their battery, need to fit in the screen.

Connectivity

The Yoga 710 is part of the new band of laptops with limited physical connections, but we’re glad to see it hasn’t ditched traditional USBs altogether in favour of USB-C ports like some new models. There’s one USB 3.0 socket on the right edge, next to a Micro-HDMI connector. Aside from the headphone jack on the other edge, that’s your lot. Using a single USB in an ultraportable like this is an understandable, if unfortunate, decision, but the lack of a memory card slot is disappointing. It makes the machine harder to get on with for anyone who works with a camera, for example. You could carry around a USB card reader, of course, but that dilutes the convenience of this otherwise extremely nifty little laptop.

To a large extent, the Micro-HDMI makes up for the lack of a Thunderbolt port, however, with an increasing number of similarly priced laptops embracing USB-C, the Yoga 11 710 will soon look dated.

Keyboard and trackpad

A more pressing worry with a laptop as small as this is whether it’s comfortable to type on, and for the most part, it is. You get a keyboard that feels like the best Lenovo’s IdeaPad laptops have to offer. While keys are predictably shallow, there’s a nice bit of resistance to them, along with well-defined feedback when the keypress actually clicks in.

This review was written using the keyboard, and after getting used to the minor quirks in its layout, typing was just as fast and accurate as with our workaday 13.3in laptop. Lenovo has kept the main keys full-size, including the ‘arrow’ buttons, which often suffer from space-saving cuts. Only the left-most row of keys appears significantly trimmed, but we found the positioning and shape of the most important one, the left Shift, just fine.

The lingering issue with a smaller laptop like this is that your palms don’t have all that much space to rest because the surround is reduced. This is a legitimate concern because it can mean you position your wrists more awkwardly, leading to that classic cramped feel. Lenovo would not claim the Yoga 11 710 has been designed for use eight hours a day as you’re tethered to a desk, though. It’s more about those times when its small frame is going to be more a benefit than an annoyance.

To match the good keyboard, the trackpad feels like that of a top-end laptop, with a smooth, non-tacky surface bordered by bevelling in the aluminium surround. It’s a good look. This is a serviceable pad with a nice, meaty click feel that doesn’t need too forceful a press, as some Windows laptops do. We do have some small issues, though. Its click is a little noisy, and while its size is about as large as you could expect for the price, you may find it too small if you play games or try to edit photos on the laptop. For day-to-day Windows navigation and browsing it’s fine, though.

The button arrangement also requires some getting used to. Like almost every ultraportable pad, the buttons are integrated into the surface, and we found it a little too easy to fire off an unintended right button command. It’s also a little too sensitive in part, causing some unintended clicks (without actually ‘clicking’ the pad) as you scroll across it. This is partly down to the driver, as well as the spacing of the RB sensor, which takes up 50 percent of the pad’s width, and about a quarter of its height.

While we’re reasonably happy with the Yoga 11 710’s trackpad, it may not necessarily be a case of love at first tap.

Display

Lenovo has, for the most part, come up trumps with the screen, though. It has a few shortcomings, but ultimately uses the right tech for the right results at this price. The Yoga 11 710 uses a 11.6in 1920x1080-pixel IPS LCD touchscreen with the character of a tablet display. It’s glossy, covered with toughened glass and lacks air gaps in the screen’s construction, so it appears completely black when switched off. That last part may not sound exciting, but it is important, as a glossy screen, it’s prone to reflections, so can’t afford any aspect that might reduce its in-context contrast.

We’ve used the Lenovo Yoga 11 710 outside on a sunny day, and while it’s not as good as a very bright matt-finish laptop, its clarity is only slightly worse than that of a MacBook Pro. After all, its maximum brightness of 346cd/m2 is bright.

The colour performance is, however, mixed. To the eye, it looks good. In daylight, the screen’s contrast appears great and the warm tones are easy on the eye. However, our colorimeter revealed that its actual abilities aren’t that hot. It covers just 61.6 percent of the sRGB colour gamut, and 42.5 percent of Adobe RGB. The Lenovo doesn’t have a technically brilliant screen, but thanks to its use of up-to-date screen construction and good calibration (its average DeltaE is 0.14), the impression it leaves is a good one.

Performance

The Yoga 11 710 uses the Intel Core M M3-6Y30 CPU. This is a high-efficiency ‘premium’ processor, though not one designed to take on gruelling tasks. It’s clocked at 900MHz and has a turbo boost of 1.5GHz. This is a dual-core CPU with four threads. The same chip is used in the entry-level version of the 12in MacBook, although Apple clocks its base frequency at 1.1GHz. It’s not a weakling and it certainly isn’t a cheap option.

In day-to-day use, it will feel about as fast as a Core i-series chip. However, it’s not designed for prolonged, heavy-duty activity. If you’re going to be doing more intensive tasks, you’d be better off with the Intel Core i-series 900, though it can run Photoshop. It scored 1998 in PCMark 8 and 4712 (2416 single) in Geekbench 3. As you’d expect, these are lower than an Intel Core i5 or i7 machine, but are respectable.

Its gaming is very poor even compared with the integrated graphics chipset of a latest-generation Intel Core i5, though. The Lenovo Yoga 11 710 can’t handle games such as 2013’s Thief, at all. Even after dropping the visuals to minimum level and the resolution to 720p, it managed a dismal 8.3fps, dropping to a slideshow-like 2.6fps with the resolution and visuals upped. Even the less demanding Alien: Isolation is totally unplayable, too. At 720p, low settings, it ran at an average 12.8fps, dropping to 6.9fps at 1080p, high settings. If you want to play some games, then you’ll need to stick to very old, or very undemanding titles.

As the Yoga 11 710 is passively cooled (no fans) and has no spinning platter hard drive, it’s totally silent in use. With light duties, only the very back of the laptop’s underside gets a little warm.

The 128GB of storage is provided by an SSD, but it’s not the bizarrely fast kind you’ll find in some ultra-expensive laptops. It can write at 157MB/s and read at 538MB/s. The fastest models are almost three times as fast, but it still comfortably beats any hard drive and is light years faster than the eMMC storage of a cheaper tablet or solid-state laptop.

As with the display, it’s not top-end, but is good enough to offer step-up real-life performance.

Audio

The speakers are surprisingly respectable for a slim and light laptop. Two drivers fire out from the front of the laptop’s underside, and they produce a fuller, richer sound than expected, as well as fair maximum volume that doesn’t cause distortion. There’s a granularity to the mids, but it’s not unpleasant. These are surprisingly decent speakers. And like the best laptops drivers, extend beyond the width of the laptop, as minor a feat as that might seem in a laptop this size.

Battery life

Lenovo claims the 40Wh battery of the Yoga 11 710 will last for eight hours. But if anything that’s conservative. We achieved almost dead on that using the laptop out and about for a day’s work, which included several hours with the display on maximum brightness to combat the glossy display’s reflectivity on a sunny day.

When simply playing an MP4 video direct from the SSD at 120cd/m2 brightness, the Yoga 11 710 lasted nine hours and 45 minutes. This is a very long-lasting laptop, and a pretty strong case for Intel’s latest Core M processors when Core i-series alternatives often struggle to last their ‘claimed’ hours in real use.

Verdict

The Lenovo Yoga 11 710 is a great laptop for those who travel a lot or who have no need for a big computer. This is one of the best alternatives to the 12in MacBook, a truly tiny machine that offers better value than Apple, not to mention a touchscreen and an ultra-flexible hinge. It’s not powerful, but that’s not the point. The trackpad, like several of Lenovo’s recent models, is not perfect. But given the great value on offer here, it’s worth persevering with.