Usage & Testing
When I first started using the Yoga 11 two things really stood out to me. How thin and light it was and that it was going to take a bit for me to get used to the keyboard. The unit itself is extremely light and thin. This makes it easy to carry with you and when you are using it in tablet mode it is not too heavy to be holding for a long time. While the device is thin and light it does have a very solid and well-built feel to it. When you are flipping the screen around the hinges do not feel weak at all. This is of course good as you will be doing that quite a bit with this laptop.
The keyboard definitely took me a little while to get used to. With this being a 11.6-inch laptop you do not have a whole ton of space to work with, but Lenovo has done a great job giving you all of the necessary keys. While I did find the keyboard comfortable I did notice that it would miss many keystrokes when I would be typing. I’m not sure if it was just me, but it did become very annoying when trying long blog posts or reviews like this one. Along with the keyboard you do have a touchpad and of course the screen is a 5-finger touch panel. The panel is very responsive and I did not notice any issues with it at all. The screen on the unit works very well for most things and is very vibrant thanks to the 350 nit brightness. If you do plan on using the Yoga outside you will need to block it with some type of shade for optimal viewing.
This is a Windows RT tablet so you are not going to get that full functionality of Windows 8. That means you will be stuck in the Windows RT ecosystem. The Yoga does come stock with Microsoft Office so for those looking to be productive that is a definite plus. I was actually pretty surprised with the performance of video playback on the Yoga. NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 platform does much better with HD video than Intel Atom-based tablets. Both 720p and 1080p playback on the device was flawless. Battery life is great as well, Lenovo has a 4-cell battery in the Yoga and in our testing we were able to get a full days use of out it! Using the Yoga as a tablet device you are not going to not going to notice a difference between many other Windows RT tablets. Now if you are using the Yoga as a laptop, it will not compare to laptops that are powered by Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors in terms of performance.
Since we are using Windows RT we are unable to use some of our favorite benchmarking tools for Tablets and Laptops. For that reason we have opted to use some new benchmarks, they include PC Benchmark and GFXBench.
PC Benchmark is an overall system benchmark that tests your Disk, CPU, RAM and GPU.
The second test is GFXBench, which as you can guess is a graphics benchmark.
