Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S Review By MobileTechReview

This is Lisa from mobile tech review and this is the Lenovo yoga 11s. Finally, just like the ThinkPad helix, we French saw this at CES in January of this year, and it took that long for it to arrive much like the yoga 11 that well, the number came out within the fall of last year, but this time we have fully Intel ensign in its full windows: ?, it's not Windows RT, but definitely the baby, brother or baby sister to the yoga at 13. Then we're gonna look at it now. So, finally, just like we said for the Lenovo ThinkPad helix here it is the yoga 11 s, so I know she's six months ago now at CES, and we were really excited about I know a lot of you were too, and so how do you feel about it? Six months later, it's still a really cool device. One thing: that's going to hurt a bit. Is it's not running intel, Haskell? Fourth generation CPUs we're still on third generation.

The interesting thing is, though, this is running on the Y Series CPU, which is an even lowered old voltage. CPU, that's good for tablets and for tiny devices. I think Lenovo was try and put that into the helix originally ?, but they ended up with going with full you all these they're here they could stick with the Y series, CPU for a greater power saving. So basically you can run two different voltages, and it idles along and does moderate work at a lower voltage saying to save you some power, that's obviously important, especially in the face of hassle, because that brings us so much more battery life, often up 25 percent. More so we don't have Haskell here, but we do have the Y series, CPU and indeed Lenovo claims that this little guy can run for six hours on a charge, and we've been finding that, with average productivity used some streaming, video brightness set of 50 percents of pretty bright display, Wi-Fi on that we've been getting about five hours out of it, which is decent for an eleven point, six-inch laptop.

Of course, it's not your average laptop. Just like the yoga 13, which has been wildly popular. This thing does the flip the twist you name it, and you can use it you're. Just like a laptop like this, you can use it absolutely flattened I've, never understood how useful that would be, but you could do it if you wanted probably for some games. Oh, if you wanted to fly on the table, air hockey action there.

That would work, and you can flip it like so for presentation mode. So you can show somebody else what's going on, or you can just instead of using some kind of stand. Obviously you just want to interact with the tablet itself. Maybe watch a movie, something like that can just prop it up. So it's facing you, and you can control it with the touchscreen right here, and you can use a completely flat as a tablet which is pretty cool and yes as an accelerometer, so you can use it in landscape or portrait orientation, but it is a 3.0 eight pound tablet. So this is not light like your Nexus 10 Android tablet or your iPad 3.

Certainly it's got some weight to it. You're going to feel it if you're holding it up. You're. Probably going to prop it against your legs or against something if you're going to use it in tablet mode. Now this is a touchscreen machine right here.

This does not have an active digitizer with digital pen like the ThinkPad helix. So for those of you who want the precise digital pen, this is not the product for you. You can use a capacitive stylus, but if you try those on an iPad or an Android product, you know that you don't get any palm rejection, and they're not exactly very precise better than nothing. Yes, this is a nice bright IPS display with very good color saturation. You can see here we have this psycho beautiful, green grass going on here, and it's ultra vibrant, a pleasing screen to look at 1366 by 768 resolution.

So this is not a full HD machine, Lenovo positions. This is to be a mid-range machine, not one of their highest end machine, so you're not going to get full HD. That said, I'm not really feeling too terribly sad about it. Everything looks nice and sharp. This runs Windows, 8, 64-bit.

Obviously, right now we're in the traditional desktop, and you can get to your Live Tiles with the press of the physical button right here, not capacitive. So that's good! It's not prone to accidental touching bottom. Here we have the ventilation- and yes just like with the yoga 13 the keyboard faces out and against you. So if Lenovo sells a $29 slipcover right here, so you can slip that on, so you don't have to feel the keys, and you don't jam against them. So much.

It's got little cutouts on it, so you can actually use the controls on the device. Now that said, it's pretty sturdy, you haven't had any problem with the keys popping off. I am kind of careful with it, though here's our rectangular power connector, is what Lenovo has been using lately fast charging, no complaints, they're SD card slot. We have a blank and then our USB 2.0 port over here- and this is our rotation lock button in case you don't want the screen to rotate and on this side, USB 3.0 port. We have our full size, HDMI 3.5, millimeter, combo, headphone jack, speaker grilles, are on the sides over here. This is your volume control.

So, if you're using in tablet mode, you have quick access to hardware volume controls. Of course those are also available on the top row of the keyboard and over here we have our power button. A little LED indicator light. You know when it's turned on, and this is our one key recovery button right here: recessed video, impressive by access. So if you need assistance or recovery, you can press that now.

If we take a look at the keyboard, isn't this an interesting way to be able to present the keyboard right here? It is Lenovo fakir type keyboard. The smile shaped keys as always excellent keyboard, 11.6 inch machines, usually not the greatest for typing, on really nice I very much enjoyed typing on this very good accuracy rate. It didn't take me long to get adjusted to it. Nice I travel for a relatively fairly thin machine. There's a good amount of key movement there, a little of auditory feedback as well.

The only drawback is, it is not backlit. They only give you backlighting on their ThinkPad models and some of their higher ends like the Lenovo, y50 and y500. So you're going to have to do that backlighting here, and we have their large trackpad here. It works. Fine Lenovo generally has pretty good trackpads the usual button list.

Design pull thing moves, and it clicks, and this it has. It looks so like brushed metal at first, but it's really it's a rubbery coating, and it feels really cool its drippy, but you're not too sticky, and it makes it look quite nice too. Now the outside. It's just like the yoga xi. You could get it with your choice of either gray or Clementine orange, and this time around Clementine orange is available right away with the yoga 13.

It took them a while before the orange version came out. You can order it right now with the orange. If you want- and this is a very nice soft touch coating, it feels perfect, particularly gripping it on the bottom. It's nice, it's not going to just go sliding around the table. We have these rubber feet here, for those of you who are adventurous.

Loved Lenovo really doesn't build this as being a user upgradeable machine. But if you want to there's a bunch of Torn screws here, you can see that you can take apart, and you can lift the keyboard out from the front to act. Your internals in terms of what you get inside on this machine. You can get either a 1.4 gigahertz core i5 y series CPU again and that's the base model that starts at 749. There's a core i5 model that we have with a 1.5 gigahertz Y series CPU, and this is their kind of decent bundle model right here for 9.99 you get the core i5 1.5 gigahertz, which I'd recommend over the 1.4. You get 256 gig SSD instead of 128 gigs, and you get 8 gigs around.

It is also available in that base model with 4 gigs of ram, and you can get a core i7 as well. It's still that wide series CPU- probably not as much of a benefit there, because the white series is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. That's not to say it's a total loser by any means. It's absolutely nothing like say. The Intel Atom are the real low powered, AMD CPUs, and it used in netbooks is just a little slower than the UV Ultrabook CPUs, because it's doing a lot more power conservation in terms of performance, our model with feet: I 5, ?, 3, 3, 3, 9 y 1.5, gigahertz, 8, gigs of ram and a Samsung 256 gigs SSD inside its court, a 38 37 on PC mark 7. They usually we see something around 4,500 for UV Ultrabooks, so you can see you're losing about 600 points of score, thereby going with the Y Series CPU, but you are getting a cooler, quieter machine that has better battery life.

Certainly then, if they've gone with a full UV for this guy, and really it doesn't get hot anywhere and generally speaking, it's fairly quiet soon. Now, if you try to have made it play a demanding 3d game which is really not up to doing. To be honest, it's not that Swift the machine, but you could try running something like say, 5, on and at native resolution. It would run fine, you're gonna, hear those fans, then on 3dmark 11 it scored a performance setting for 97, which is the 720p test setting so about par for the course there. Usually, we see 500 to 550 on UV Ultrabooks w prime.

We scored 32 point oh five seconds, and you can see our Windows Experience Index right here, 6.4 for processor 7.2 from memory, so that tells us that's a very good score that this hasn't Cheney channel memory configuration at least with the 8 gig model 4.7 for desktop graphics. I would like to see it a little higher like 5.2 5.5, but that's okay, 6.2 for gaming, graphics and 8.1 for the SSD drive. This is available in 128 256 and 512gb SSD s once again for Wi-Fi you're, getting Related, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth here, and it's single band, that's something that Lenovo keeps doing with their yoga machines and their IdeaPad line in general, and we really love them to move to dual-band Wi-Fi at this point, just kind of silly right now and even a mid-range smartphone has dual-band Wi-Fi. But that is what it is so know why down? There and if you happen to attend the school that requires you have dual-band Wi-Fi. Well, this won't work unless you get an external USB, Wi-Fi adapter to meet that requirement for your school.

The machine does not have, and it's NFC, nor does it have 3G or 4G integrated as an option. You can, of course, use your smartphone as a mobile hotspot with this or use a Mini. That kind of thing, if you need data connection anywhere again, Lenovo usually looks to including that, with their ThinkPad line more than their IdeaPad ranger products of the yoga range of products. Overall, it feels solid much like the very popular yoga 13. It's durable metal, cage inside rubbery finish outside, so it's drippy and you, you probably could tear the rubber finish eventually on this or wear a corner off, but honestly I don't see any imminent problem with that happening right now, attractive enough with Lenovo's book design.

It's nice looking I think it's really cool looking at orange, but that's just me: sturdy, no flex, stiff nice, big hinges over here. Nice stiff hinges, -. It doesn't wobble or anything like that when you poke at the screen so really well done, and basically, if you like the yoga 13 but want something even more portable, that's what this guy is. The charger is quite compact. This is actually the same one that used with the helix and some other recent laptops, and it's got again the rectangular style new connector that they use charges very quickly, no complaints with them and that will test streaming.

Video playback using our YouTube channel here we're at 720p, because that matches display resolution of 1366 by 768 best, and we're gonna, give it a try hardware volume for the operating system to the 60% YouTube volume. Slider is AA maximum and in the middle after this, we'll switch to 1080p just to see how it looks and handles 1080p fans are not even turning on yet and really. This is a nice sharp, bright, IPS display again I'm, not really complaining too much about the resolution does 1366 by 768. Well, it's easily viewable when you're on the Windows desktop, for example. Here touch elements are easier to use.

You can see the icons are there having to do any kind of scaling it all. Just works noisily terms of software, that's preloaded to give all the usual Windows Live Tiles that are standard for the operating system and Lenovo throws on a couple of things like their own companion, software, Rare, music, Kindle, McAfee, Security Advisor. Of course, any of these you don't want. You can remove Encyclopedia Britannica, which is really basically a shortcut to the website right there, your shortcut to trying out MS Office trial or installing the full version. If you have a key Intel software and film on as well any of these that you don't want, you just do that, and then you can choose to uninstall from there.

If you don't want them as usual, this has a recovery partition, so you don't have all of that.256 gigs available to you, there's about 20 gigs, that's taken up by recovery, but all the rest is yours to use. As you can see here, we have a hundred eighty-four, gigs, free, and we've put on about five gigs of our own software. So that gives you an idea of how much space you're getting on you 256 gigs, and then we have a second little D Drive here. That has your backup for your applications and your drivers' no too much there. So we have applications, but there's all your drivers in case you need them again.

So, all in all great keyboard, nice sharp display pretty bright, pleasing colors on this very durable, very rugged kind of feel to it. So if you're looking for something highly portable 11.6 inch, you think 13 inches is just too big for you and you want a good keyboard experience. You want something durable, certainly a nice enough machine, not perfect, no backlit keyboard and all do BAM Wi-Fi, that's our usual complaint with the yoga line and many of the idea pads in general, but overall, not bad and starting at 749. It's pretty affordable ?, which is certainly attractive enough and that's configured here just about the way I would like to buy with a gig around a 256, gig drive or knife storage for some multimedia files, $9.99 prevalent Nova direct. So that's the yoga 11 s is available now, starting at 749 again as configured.

This one is $9.99. It's a tablet. It's a notebook! Furthermore, it does yoga. I'm Lisa from mobile tech review, visit our website for the full review and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Source : MobileTechReview