Lenovo’s hybrid laptops have already earned a name and many awards for their sheer design elegance and performance prowess. Most recent laptops from the Chinese gadget-maker sport beautiful designs and cutting edge specs, especially those in the Yoga series. The Lenovo Yoga 730, the latest in the series, ticks all the legacy columns fairly well, mainly those in design and specs.

A thing of beauty

First things first: The machine is a beauty to look at. The Yoga 730 comes in two colours — Platinum and Iron Grey. It is sleek, lightweight (1.89 kg, but you don’t feel that while carrying it) and elegantly designed. The edges are smooth and the panels feel robust and classy. The boot time is lightning fast, one of the best in the range. They keypad is spacious and the keys are well protruding and that makes typing a super-smooth affair.

Smooth performer

The device runs on Windows 10 Home, which can be an energy guzzler at times but that’s an animal you have to live with if you are not a fan of Linux systems. That said, the Yoga 730 does a decent job on the energy consumption front thanks to its processor — 8th Gen Intel Core i7 — and an 8 GB RAM, backed by a solid slate drive (SSD) of 256/512 GB/1 TB depending on the price. Considering the price, a 16 GB RAM, which seems to be the norm in most premium hybrid laptops now, could have been the icing on the cake. The processor transforms the machine into a beast. From gaming to mundane multi-tasking, it runs without lags or drags and never hangs even when it is negotiating heavy-duty tasks such as 4K footage editing or playing games with super high refresh rates.

The display is another plus. Lenovo offers two options here: 15.6” UHD (3840 x 2160) and FHD (1920 x 1080), both having IPS touchscreen support. The device packs over eight million pixels into a 13 inches to offer a wide-angle display with thin 5.9 mm bezels. The display looks warm and well-saturated and delightfully detailed, and the colour rendition is true-to-life and loss-less. Images appear natural and not artificially enhanced. What we didn’t like about the body/display is the way precious display real estate is wasted at the bottom of the screen; the huge black margin at the bottom pops out like a no-man’s land and that could have been avoided. The graphics experience is not very great, considering the price tag, but there isn’t much to complain about except that when you are running ultra-HD or 4K footage, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 with Intel’s Integrated Graphics does seem to compromise a bit on the processing side, but you’ll notice it only if you have some professionals around you. Else, all’s kosher.

Audio needs improvement

The audio seems to be in need of some improvements. Of late, we’re noticing poor in-built speakers in several premium hybrid laptops. Are the manufacturers assuming that users will find external home theatre systems or speakers anyway and they can get away with lower specs on the audio department? Not many would buy that logic. To be fair, the Yoga 730 has JBL speakers backed by Dolby Atmos for headphones. Still the performance is an unfinished business.

The Yoga 730 has an impressive battery performance. One round of charging gives you a neat six hours even with a good amount of browsing and gaming. The 720p HD camera is poor. It manages to do the basics properly but the function is far from great. But the two Type-C Thunderbolt ports are quite useful. Both ports can be used to charge the device. There is also a full-size HDMI port and slots of DC-in and the audio jack. The device has built-in Cortana, the virtual assistant from Microsoft. But it doesn’t make much of a difference as configuring and negotiating Cortana is quite a task. Does anyone really put Cortana to any meaningful use, I wonder? Online forums are abuzz with examples showing what a waste of time the virtual assistant has become.

There is one area where we have found the Lenovo Yoga 730 excelling compared to its peers — data transfer speeds. This is one faculty where most premium laptops, despite the great specs and elegant, chic looks, desperately struggle with even today. But the Yoga 730 offers lightning fast data transfers from external devices such as USBs, Hard Drives and even when downloading, it optimises WiFi use extremely well to offer optimum use of bandwidth, improving the overall performance.

Price: ₹1,01,753 onwards

Pros: Great body, superior design, detailed and crisp display

Cons: Price is a little high, below par audio, screen space wasted at the bottom

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