Hybrid trickery
By far the X1 Yoga’s greatest talent is that its hybrid trickery doesn’t come at the expense of usability. Unlike the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, say, it’s a great laptop that just happens to turn into a king-sized tablet. Yes, it’s heavy by tablet standards, but even here it has several advantages over some of its peers, not least that the stylus docks invisibly into the X1 Yoga’s right-hand side. When there, it silently charges, but if you happen to exhaust its battery then Lenovo claims a 15-second charge will provide up to 1hr 40mins of use.
In truth, it’s hard to find anything to moan about. The backlit keyboard offers the usual ThinkPad quality and, as the X1 Yoga has a 14in chassis, it’s every bit as spacious and comfortable to type on as a desktop keyboard. Personally, I’d still rather have a touchpad with discrete buttons, but Lenovo’s buttonless touchpad is reliable, and you can always resort to the touchpoint if you prefer.
The ThinkPad X1 Yoga is more than a superb laptop, though. Tilt back the screen and the solid yet flexible hinge allows you to fold it through 360 degrees and use it in stand, tent or tablet modes.
In tablet mode, the X1 Yoga is in its element. Pull the small stylus out of the right-hand edge, and the matte finish across the display gives a lovely feel to everything from writing to sketching or annotating documents. It’s the most responsive tablet I’ve ever used – and that includes the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 – with the Wacom active digitiser and pen technology providing a perfect blend of sensitivity and accuracy.
OLED surprise
The most unusual twist in the X1 Yoga’s specifications is perhaps the one you’d least expect in a business laptop: that 14in touchscreen also comes in an optional OLED version. Our review unit had the standard IPS touchscreen, but if the OLED panel is up to these standards then expect pure brilliance. The 2,560 x 1,440 panel is so crisp and vivid that I briefly wondered if I was looking at a fake laptop. Desktop icons are suspended on an inky black and colours look gorgeously vibrant. For a while, I wondered if I actually had the OLED model in front of me.
Run through the numbers and there’s little to complain about. The panel covers 96.9% of the sRGB colour space, hits a maximum brightness of 296cd/m2, and has a solid – if not class-leading – contrast ratio of 916:1. The clincher here, however, is colour accuracy; not only has Lenovo ensured that the X1 Yoga reproduces almost all the colours you could want, it also delivers the correct shades. An average Delta E of 1.37 is good by any standards, and the maximum deviation of 3.55 isn’t bad at all. The only shortfall is the panel’s inability to delve down into the most intense blues, which is barely noticeable.
Here is a business laptop that’s equally at home with colour-critical applications as it is Excel, which is something of a rarity.
Turn of speed
No corners have been cut in the performance department. You get your choice of dual-core Core i5 or Core i7 Skylake processors, stretching up to the 2.6GHz Core i7-6600U in this review unit.
With 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM as standard, you can upgrade that to 16GB on the high-end models for a reasonable £70. Factor in the choice of everything from bog-standard 128GB SSDs to encrypted Opal 2 drives, right up to blazingly fast 1TB Samsung NVMe drives, and you can configure models from £1,300 to more than £2,000.
I didn’t find the X1 Yoga wanting for performance. This isn’t especially surprising. With a top-of-the-range Core i7, 8GB of RAM and a ridiculously fast 512GB Samsung NVMe SSD inside, you wouldn’t expect this laptop to be slow. The SSD produces read and write speeds that are superimpressive, sequential read speeds tickling the 2,000MB/sec mark, while write speeds still nudge just over