Life with the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro

Final Words

The Yoga 2 Pro is a good Ultrabook that has a few flaws that keep it from being great. First is the battery life. In a light workload, almost seven hours of battery life would have been spectacular not that long ago, but with the Haswell U series parts, it’s definitely on the low side of what is expected from the current series of Ultrabooks. For my personal situation, 6 2/3 hours is plenty, as the device is mostly used around the house or on a short trip. If the user needs a full day of work out of the laptop, there are better choices out there.

Another major complaint is the Wi-Fi card used. It is far too slow for a device in this price range, and can make the laptop difficult to work with. File copies over the network are slower than they need to be, and for only a small amount more on the bill of materials, Lenovo could have stepped up to a better solution. It is doubly important due to the lack of an Ethernet port on the device, meaning that a user could be hindered by the network performance depending on the work load. Hopefully the reports of a faster Intel Wireless AC 7260 card shipping in the latest iteration of the Yoga 2 Pro are correct, as that will certainly help with this point.

For the display, RGBW PenTile is a solution to a problem, but it’s not the best solution. However it does allow Lenovo to shoehorn a 3200x1800 resolution screen into this 13.3” chassis. As we have discussed, high DPI screens can have their issues in Windows, but overall the display is one of the standout features of this laptop. We have seen the rise of high DPI displays in tablets and smartphones for a reason, and it is great to see it in a laptop like this as well. The modern side of Windows 8.1 has no issues at all with this resolution, and is fantastic to use in this form factor. There are still some desktop programs that have issues with high DPI displays, and if you do need to use one of those you can always set the resolution to 1600x900. The only real compromise with this display is the RGBW matrix and the low contrast ratios and high black levels it produces. It may not be the best solution to a dense display, but for the price range it is understandable.

Other than those three things, there is a lot done well on the Yoga 2 Pro. The build quality is excellent, and the choice of soft touch plastic is comfortable to use and carry around. The keyboard is good, and the clickpad is nice and smooth. At 3 lbs, it is a very portable laptop. Perhaps one could nitpick that the laptop only has two USB ports, but two ports combined with the inclusion of an SD Card reader has not been a problem for me.

And then we come to the part of the laptop that gives it the name Yoga – the 360° hinge. Something that retrospectively comes across as so basic transforms this otherwise normal Ultrabook into a great device for touch input. For a lot of my use cases, I actually prefer the Yoga 2 in Stand Mode over a standard tablet. It is better for a lot of the web content I access because I do not have to hold the device up, and the performance of a Core i5 is better than any ARM based tablet out there. It is heavier than an ARM based tablet, but the benefit of Stand Mode removes the need to hold up the device. For watching videos, it is likewise great to prop the device open and enjoy a larger display than most tablets have.

The other modes are less useful though, at least in my experience. I have used the tent mode from time to time with the device on a table or counter, but not as often as in laptop or stand mode. With the display folded all the way around, it comes across as a poor tablet due to the weight, and the keyboard feels odd tucked underneath.

As a laptop, it is great, and as a tablet, it can also be great, but it is certainly more laptop than tablet. If the user can live with the battery life and poor W-Fi, the Yoga 2 Pro is a versatile two-in-one machine, with a crisp high resolution display.