Lenovo’s 2-in-1 laptop goes slick and snazzy

By now we’re all familiar with Lenovo’s Yoga range — the laptops with the screen that bends all the way back until it goes into tablet mode, passing many usable positions on the way.

I’ve seen previous generations of the Yoga come in exciting colours like a tangerine orange and some brilliant shades of green. But I haven’t seen one quite like the Yoga 920 Vibe, a special edition version that has a unique design on the cover. Instead of the usual steely or aluminium finish grey-black, we have a lid made of Gorilla Glass. Under that is a pattern made up of waves of dotted lines in blue and white. It’s difficult to describe, but if you could visualise a vibe, this is probably what it would look like.

Visual vibration

For this design, Lenovo worked with Italy’s prestigious Istituto Europeo di Design (IED Milan), holding a contest soliciting design concepts for the Yoga 920’s special Gorilla Glass cover. The mission was to design a cover that would appeal to today’s global consumer. The entry would get its designer a scholarship from Lenovo. The winner was a student named Louis Aymonod and he named the design “Vibes of Elegance”. He conceptualised it to depict vibrations and dynamism and lightness, and something that would give the machine a soul. The result is a pretty mesmerising cover where you are normally accustomed to seeing a no-nonsense expanse of metal. Here’s how Lenovo describes it: “The winning design, which would become the Lenovo Yoga 920 Vibe, is perhaps best described as an undulating carpet of lines consisting of pale-to-white dots against an onyx-colored backdrop that gives the glass cover a sense of movement or, what Aymonod describes as, “visual vibration.”

The rest of this mean machine is designed very neatly. Everything is where you expect it to be. When you open it up, it’s a familiar feel. The silver finish aluminium keyboard area feels smooth and clean with its large touch pad and a little fingerprint sensor on the side. That, incidentally, works as fast as any on a smartphone. The keyboard itself is excellent with keys you can type with for hours. They have exactly the right amount of travel one would want on a keyboard — soft and springy without being too noisy.

Lenovo says the Yoga 920 is one of the lightest convertible laptops. That it may be, but it’s not the slimmest and has slightly sharp edges all around that need some rounding out and softening, especially if the machine is to be used in tablet mode. Of course, 14 inches is rather too large for it to be in tablet mode for very long and it’s much more likely to be used in ‘tent’ mode. The famous ‘watchband’ hinge keeps the screen firmly and strongly attached and you can unhesitatingly bend to reposition it as you see fit. The screen doesn’t wobble as much as I’ve noticed in previous convertibles, but it’s still not possible to eliminate that entirely without making it extremely stiff to move around, which wouldn’t be nice either. So you’ll always notice a little bounce-back when you touch the screen

Creative canvas

When you open up the Yoga and switch it, on Cortana takes you through a guided initialisation for Windows 10. You can sync your phone to the laptop at this point if you like. Fingerprints, passwords, etc, are handled at this point. In a few minutes, you’re good to go. The display is a brilliant 4K that I particularly liked because it didn’t seem to hit my eyes with glare, while at the same time was pleasingly vivid. It’s very responsive, both to touch, and while functioning. There isn’t a hiccup as it orients itself from laptop to tablet mode or from landscape to portrait mode. The display has to be responsive because one gets Lenovo’s Active Pen, a stylus with which one can write, draw, mark-up and manipulate items and objects on-screen. The laptop is also responsive because of its sheer computing power. The 920 works with an 8th gen Intel Core i7-8550U processor and 16 GB DDR4 RAM. It’s fast and smooth, but isn’t meant for things like hardcore gaming, which really need dedicated machines. It gets a little hot under the collar if you tax it with too many intensive things or try and work with something processor-intensive while it’s updating. It has a 512 GB Samsung NVMe SSD drive, which also works fast. Battery life isn’t bad.

If there’s one thing that may make you think twice, it’s the price. At ₹1,49,990, it’s a bit of a luxury. But then, there are plenty in the country who would be happy enough to afford it.

Price: ₹1,49,990

Pros: Lovely unique design, brilliant display, top-notch performance, pen included, strong bend-back screen

Cons: Somewhat sharp edges, no card reader, pricey integrated graphics

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