Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 review

The Yoga's a fairly innocuous ultrabook. The matte gray machine's black sides, slightly rounded and sloped corners, and undecorated exterior definitely won't catch your eye on a store shelf, but that's not necessarily a bad thing — it's nice-looking in a simple sort of way. At three and a half pounds and two-thirds of an inch thick, it's just a middle-of-the-road ultrabook. It's noticeably heavier and larger than a MacBook Air or the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but not so large to worsen my back problems as I carried it around.

The clamshell's gray exterior opens up to reveal entirely black insides — the keys, palmrest, bezel, and trackpad are all the same matte black. The understated look matches well with the ultra-colorful Windows 8 interface, taking no attention away from the display. The only problem is that the display's hard to get at: the Yoga's base isn't heavy enough to hold in place, so you need both hands to open the lid, and it's hard to get enough purchase underneath the tiny lip on the front to get the top open.

On the right side of the Yoga (if you're using it like a laptop — as you'll see, "sides" are all very fungible with this device) sit a full-size SD card slot, a USB 2.0 port, and the blocky yellow jack for the power adapter. The one and only USB 3.0 port rests on the left, next to an HDMI port and the headphone jack. The power button is on the front, and there are physical volume controls on the left side — both are very unlike a laptop's normal configuration, but make sense for all the ways you'll use the Yoga. And much though I worried about it, I never once accidentally pressed the power button in my lap.

Its leathery palmrest and soft-touch exterior give the Yoga a very comfortable feel unlike the cold slickness of, say, the MacBook Air. The matte exterior is a bit odd to the touch, though — one of my co-workers said "it kind of feels like touching a human." I definitely prefer the look of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which combines the comfortable feel with a more handsome design. The Yoga is well-made for sure, but it won't exactly get the oohs and ahhs the X1 Carbon did.

All its contortionist tendencies aside, the Yoga's screen is relatively uninteresting. It's a good display, to be sure — the 13.3-inch IPS panel's 1600 x 900 resolution is a notch above many ultrabooks, and its color reproduction and brightness are both as good as I'd expect. But it pales next to the 1080p screens on the Asus Zenbook Prime and a few others, especially when you use it as a tablet. 1600 x 900 is more than adequate at a typical laptop distance — and 1080p might even be too high in some cases, making everything on the screen seem tiny — but when you hold the screen closer to your face every pixel really counts. But still, It's neither the best nor the worst display I've seen on a device in this class, this size, or this price.

The only problem I had with the screen was its touch response: the Yoga seemed to miss a few more taps and swipes than I'd normally expect. It also occasionally registered taps when I meant to swipe, and swipes when I meant to tap. It didn't happen often, or reliably — I couldn't recreate problems, for instance — but I wound up swiping right and opening the New York Times app a few too many times.

Two speakers are hidden in the fan vents on the rear of the machine, and they're more or less bog standard — decent enough, and these actually have richer-than-average sound, but nothing special. I periodically get Stockholm Syndrome with computer speakers, thinking they're totally adequate, and then I plug my computer into my external speakers and my ears immediately rejoice and look upon my computer with disdain. That happened about thirty times with the Yoga.

Since this is an IdeaPad and not a ThinkPad, there are a couple of key accoutrements missing. There's no red TrackPoint nipple, and no separate, clickable mouse buttons — personally I don't miss either, but if you're a TrackPoint devotee that might be a dealbreaker. Instead you get a sleek, all-black tray with a clickpad and six rows of full-size keys.

Both are more like a ThinkPad than not, and that's a great thing. The keyboard uses the same "smile" design we saw on the X1 Carbon and elsewhere — the slightly concave keys are comfortable to use, easy to get used to, and have just the right amount of travel and feedback. The only problem is the layout: the right-side Shift and Backspace keys are half their normal size, and I found myself accidentally hitting = and / a lot. The Home, End, PgUp / Dn keys take up the right-most column on the keyboard, and it throws off the alignment of the keyboard otherwise; I always had to set my hands where I thought home row was, and then move them one key to the left before I could type properly. But after a few hours of using the Yoga exclusively, I was fully up to speed, typing as fast and accurately as I can on any other machine. As long as it was light out, anyway — the keyboard isn't backlit, which is a really frustrating omission.

Trackpad

The trackpad's a mixed bag. Its surface is smooth and glassy, and my fingers glide over it easily, but what happens on the screen isn't quite on the same level. Two-finger scrolling works, but sometimes takes a couple of swipes to kick in — it's like it needs to warm up before it's ready to scroll. It does scroll both vertically and horizontally, though, which is great for moving around the Start screen and Windows 8 apps.

As a pure pointing device, it never failed me, but it misses on some of the more complex things. Edge gestures (key to navigating Windows 8) are maddeningly inconsistent — sometimes I was just moving my finger left and it swiped in the most recent app, and then when I'd try to switch apps it would just move the cursor a bit. It's like it was teasing me. These are certainly driver issues, and probably can and will be fixed, but I was frequently reminded how many bugs are left to work out in Windows 8.

Continuing the theme of "a pretty normal machine that does wacky things with its hinge," the Yoga's battery life is about what you'd expect from an ultrabook. It lasted five hours, eight minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res images with the screen set to 65 percent brightness. In normal use — charge it fully, unplug it, work a regular day, and see how long it lasts – I got between five and five and a half hours depending on how many times I needed to use Photoshop. That's an acceptable result, but nothing to write home about.

The Yoga's fans kick in basically any time you touch the computer — it doesn't take much for them to start whirring. Most of the time it's really quiet, though, and you'll only notice it in a silent room — plus, the machine barely gets warm unless you're cranking through The Witcher 2, and if some slight fan noise is the tradeoff I'll take it. When you're gaming or using a heavy app like Photoshop, though, the fan blasts hot air out the back at a pretty high volume.