Lenovo ThinkPad L13 Yoga Full Review - Entry Level Thinkpad 2-in-1 By Lon.TV

Hey everybody, it's Lon, madman we're taking a look today at an entry level, think pad from Lenovo. This is their l13 yoga and when Lenovo calls something a yoga, that means it is a two in one, so you can flip it around into display mode make it into a tablet. If you want or have it work in tent mode or of course just have it work as a traditional laptop we're going to be taking a closer look at this device and seeing what it can and can't do in just a second, but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this is on loan from Lenovo, so we're done with this. It goes back to them all the opinions you're about to hear are my own. Nobody is paying for this review. Nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded.

So, let's get into it now and see what this laptop is all about. Now the price point on this one is going to vary based on where you buy it from and your configuration choices uh. So right now it looks like the entry point is selling for about 730 on Lenovo's site, with an i3 processor and four gigs of ram uh. This particular model is being sold at best, buy right now for about 8.99, but you might find it for less, depending on sales and promotions that might be going on so definitely shop around a little to see if you can get the configuration and price point that you're looking for. So let's take a closer look now at the hardware.

All of them have a 13.3 inch display. This is running at 300 nits, so a little brighter than what we typically see on the entry level point in a particular premium product line. So the display looks really nice and bright, perfect contrast ratio on it as well. It's not quite up to OLED levels of contrast, but it's good. I was really pleased with that contrast ratio.

These, of course, are touch displays if I get my finger in the right place here, given that this is a two in one convertible, so that's good to see. If you want a touch screen, it will have some reflectivity to it, of course, but it looks really, really nice. In my humble opinion, inside our review unit here we have an i5 10210u processor from intel. It also has eight gigabytes of ram, but the ram on all models is soldered on. I believe the maximum you can get configured is 16 gigabytes and whatever you get when you buy, it is what you're going to be stuck with, because again you can't upgrade the ram.

I do believe you can upgrade the storage on it, so you can swap out its NVMe SSD. If you wish this one came with 256 gigabytes of onboard storage, I like the fact that it's got one of the manual shutters here at the top, like many other Lenovo laptops do these days. So that's nice to see if you want some privacy on your camera there and, of course, this being a Lenovo device, a Lenovo ThinkPad device, you get the ThinkPad keyboard. The keys are a little smaller than your typical ThinkPad, but they're not bad to type on, primarily because they're very well spaced and, like all think, pads, you've got a tremendous amount of key travel here as you're typing, so super comfortable to type on a really, really good keyboard on this one, like all the other think pads. But again, the keys are just a little smaller than what I typically see on other think pads.

The keyboard is backlit single color, but it's good that you can see it in the dark of course. So that's on there and, of course, this being a ThinkPad. You've got the little nub here to use as a mouse. If you want you've got two mouse buttons here, plus the center button that you can use with that nub, and you also have the built-in click pad here that you can use as well, and you've got a fingerprint sensor right there too. Now the weight on this one is just over three pounds or 1.43 kilograms. It's got a good solid feel to it, although most of it is made out of plastic.

So the top of the unit here, the back of the display- is metal and aluminum, but the rest of it is a glass fiber, infused plastic. It does feel really solid. It does meet some mil-spec guidelines for durability, but it is at the end of the day, mostly plastic with a nice metal cover here, but it does feel pretty solid and well-built, like most think, pads typically feel. We've got a lot of ports on this one to take a look at so let's switch up to our overhead view and have a look. What you got here are two USB type-c ports.

These are not thunderbolt, but they are full service ports, so they can take power in, in addition to display output and still working with your data devices. So you can use these with those docking stations that are those single cable solutions. So you can get power in, and video and data back and forth out of a single cable right here is Lenovo's little Ethernet adapter, so it does have Ethernet built in, but you do need a dongle to connect to that Ethernet port to get it on your network, but it does have built-in Ethernet. If you have that adapter we did not get one in the box. I do believe that is a purchased add-on, but if you've used think pads before you have likely seen that connector before next to it, we've got an USB.3.0 port got a headphone microphone jack over there and on the other side, we've got the power switch. You have a SD card slot here for a micro SD card, so you can augment your onboard storage with a card that you put inside all the time.

It sits flush to it. You got another USB 3 port here. Another display output option with a HDMI output here and a Kensington lock, but one of the cool things about this device, given that it is a two in one, is that it has a built-in pen that garages itself right inside the case here, and it also charges itself inside the case too, which I thought was really clever, and we'll be taking a closer look at this pen in a few minutes. So let's take a look now and see how it performs, and we'll begin with some basics here, just going to the NASA. gov homepage and browsing around a bit.

As you can see, everything renders in very quickly no problems here that I can detect, and it should work this way for what it has inside, so all good there and working as expected. This does not have Wi-Fi six, at least at the time I'm recording this video. It's just an ac wireless radio, but for most folks with an ac router. This is going to be just fine and, as you can see here all is good on my ac network. I also have the 1080p 60 YouTube video that I like to play back on these devices to see how they do, and I'm not seeing any dropped frames.

I will pick up some when I go from the windowed mode here to full screen, but once it starts playing, it's able to keep up with some higher end streaming, video just fine. So I think if you're watching a lot of YouTube or twitch or doing Netflix or something you shouldn't have any problems here, playing back video at the full frame rate and on the browser bench. org speedometer test. We got a score of 185 on version, 1.0 of that test and 97.3 on version 2.0, and that puts this one pretty much where I thought it would land in performance on that browser-based benchmark, that benchmark runs in Google Chrome and looks at web browsing performance, but also the interactivity performance when you're doing things like google, docs and other types of productivity applications involving the web and all in this intel chip is more than capable at doing those things, but definitely keep an eye on the two AMD based devices on that chart. Because we're going to see a very different score when we get into gaming in a few minutes now for battery life on this one, if you're doing the basics on the web or doing some word, processing or excel, or something and keeping the display brightness relatively down kind of at the midpoint, I think you should be able to easily get through a workday with this one, probably about eight to ten hours of battery life, if you're playing games or have the brightness up more, that's certainly going to impact battery life more negatively, but I think you could definitely squeeze eight to ten hours, if not more out of this, based on the testing that we did, and it also charges up very quickly over that USB connection.

So it's got a nice fast recharge time on it, which was good to see here. Let's take a look now at the pen, and then we'll get into some more fun stuff all right. So let's take the pen out of the garage here and start writing. What's nice about the pen is that it has a perfect detection range on the display here so check it out, as the pen is about a half an inch away. The computer starts picking it up and that's important because if you're like me, and you're, often lifting your pen up from the surface to go to the next letter or word, your wrist is not going to get detected in between words and that's something.

That's happened to me on a bunch of tablets in the past, where you're writing out very quickly and once the pen gets too far away. It starts picking up the bottom of the wrist and the screen starts scrolling and everything on here once that pen gets within usually about a half inch of the display, it's starting to find it and ignoring any other input, and that was something I noticed right away. This is an active pen compatible pen, so you do have the buttons here on the pen for doing the things in the apps that you would expect those buttons to do. It's fully compatible with all the Microsoft pen stuff, and then it also has some pressure sensitivity built in as well. So if we scroll up here a little and I do a very light line- you get one level, and then I can push down a little further and get a darker line.

Lenovo says you have 2048 levels of pressure, sensitivity and altogether. This is one of the better pen experiences I've had on a window two and one. So let's take a look now at its gaming performance, and I was actually surprised to see that this did not do as well versus some other 10th generation intel based machines. We've looked at recently, and the reason is, is that the processor that they picked for this one does not have the new intel GPUs. We are seeing on some other laptops that come in at around this price point and as a result, its gaming performance is roughly where the prior generation chips were.

So, let's have a look at rocket league here. First, this is running at 1080p, the lowest settings and, as you can see, we're in the 20 frames per second territory, and this is a game with the new chipsets that we would be seeing typically in the 30 to 40 frames per second or more at the same settings. Another example here is GTA 5. We're running this at 720p, and here we are struggling to maintain 20 frames per second you'll, see it dipped down here quite a bit when we turn the corner there and that's something that we would not see on a 10th generation processor with the new graphics. In fact, we could run this game at 1080p, usually around 30 frames per second or more.

We also looked at the 2016 version of doom and this one fared the worst. This is 720p at the lowest settings and, as you can see, it is running super slow here at about 20 frames per second or so again. This is another game that would run much better if the chip had the new intel graphical enhancements built into it. So this is definitely going to be more for business and productivity use than it will be for gaming and that's important to know going into this, because there are a lot of other 10th generation intel machines out there. That will do a lot better because they have those graphics enhancements.

So look for a chip with the g7 at the end of it. That will give you a much better gaming experience versus what you're going to get out of this particular one and on the 3dmark cloud gaming benchmark test. We got a score of 8429 and if you look just above the ThinkPad on the chart there to the Acer, swift 3, it too has a 10th generation, i5 processor, but it has the enhanced g1 graphics on board that this one lacks, and you can see that one does a little better here on the benchmark, and we also found in our review that it does a little better on the games that we were playing on it as well. And then, if you look another notch up, you'll see a g7 equipped machine from dell that one does even better, but the best performance you'll see here is out of another Lenovo machine. That's powered by one of the new AMD Ryzen 4000 series, laptop spectacular graphics performance out of some really thin and light laptops now with those AMD chips that also get good battery life, so they're good for gaming, and also good for productivity and, if you're, really looking to play games.

I would definitely point you towards a machine equipped with one of those dozen chips. Lenovo makes a bunch of them and other manufacturers are starting to do the same as well and on the 3dmark stress test. We got a score of 97.3 percent, that's a passing grade, and it indicates that the computer is not likely to throttle itself when it's under sustained load. You should see pretty consistent performance on this laptop again, even if you're stressing the processor. You will, though, of course hear the fan come on, and you'll want to keep the bottom here clear to get that airflow going through the fan, isn't obnoxiously loud, but you'll definitely hear it.

It's not any worse than other laptops. I've looked at that are around this size. There are some settings you can adjust to prevent that fan from coming on, but of course that will result in more throttling. So you have to kind of balance, fan noise versus performance all the time on this, but I found that generally, the fan is not kicking on unless I'm doing something, that's really stressing out the processor, so web browsing and other things really pretty quiet operation. It's only when you're doing games you're trying to do some video editing on it or something that you might hear the fan more frequently a lot of times too windows will update in the background.

That, of course, will kick the fan on, but generally sitting on the desk here at idle or close to idle. It's been pretty quiet, speaking of noise. The speakers here are on the bottom, decent stereo separation, they're, nice and loud, but because they are downward firing, the audio quality will vary based on what surface they're resting on. They didn't sound great from a range of sound perspective. I didn't get a lot of bass out of them, but they're good enough.

I think for a conference call or watching some videos or something, but you do of course, have the option to use Bluetooth headphones or directly attached headphones. If you want all right, one last thing to check out and that is its Linux performance, we were able to boot. Ubuntu up on it. As you can see, I was able to detect Wi-Fi Bluetooth, audio the touch display. Everything seemed to work.

Just fine, as you can see there, we were doing a little of web browsing, but when we started typing on the keyboard, nothing was working. It wasn't detecting any key presses when we had Ubuntu loaded up. Oddly enough, though, I could adjust the brightness of the display with the function keys, it was detecting those key presses, but not the actual keyboard itself. The mouse was working. Just fine and like I said, everything else worked great, but the keyboard was not, and this might be a very simple driver that we have to locate but out of the box, it was not picking up that keyboard.

That's the first time we haven't seen a keyboard work in one of our Linux tests here, but I'm sure many of you out there probably know what we can do to fix that. Let me know down in the comments section about that, but overall nice little device here from Lenovo, if you like, think pads, I think this is an affordable one, at least compared to some of the more expensive thing pads that are out there, even though it's mostly plastic, it still feels really rugged. Just a nice overall look and feel on this and every bit of ThinkPad. If you have been accustomed to using the unique features of these devices from a hardware standpoint, I would have liked for them to have picked an intel processor with those enhanced graphics. I think it would have made it a better, more attractive machine for people looking for some light gaming.

Unfortunately, that was not the choice here, but beyond that it is a solid device here that feels like a pretty decent entry point into the ThinkPad product line. That is going to do it for now until next time. This is Lon madman. Thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the London TV supporters, including gold level supporters, tom Albrecht, Chris allegretto, David Hoffman, Brian parker, mike Patterson, and bill Pomerania. If you want to help the channel you can, by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot TV support, to learn more and don't forget to subscribe, visit, lawn dot TV s.

Source : Lon.TV