Hands-on review: IFA 2016: Lenovo Yoga 910

After sticking with the same design for two years, Lenovo is giving the Yoga 900 a dramatic makeover and it's fair to say the Yoga 910 is completely different 2-in-1 laptop. Lenovo has tweaked or completely changed every element of its flagship convertible with everything including a slimmer chassis, larger 13.9-inch UHD screen, smaller bezels, revamped keyboard layout and the Intel 7th generation processors.

However, all these little improvements have made the Lenovo Yoga 910 a slightly more expensive device starting at $1,299. But even with the higher price tag, this still feels like the best hybrid machine on the market.

Design

Lenovo claims the Yoga 910 the world's thinnest Intel Core i7 powered convertible measuring in at just 14.3mm thick (0.56 inches) – 0.6mm (0.02 inches) thinner than the Yoga 900. Along with dropping some extra bulk, this new hybrid has a new sleeker and sharper styling rather than the slightly curvy frame of yesteryear.

The Lenovo Yoga 910 follows a starkly modern design with straight lines forming sharp angles including places you wouldn't expect such embellishment. For example, the top and bottom half of the notebook meet to a slightly indented V-shape and an even more prominent gap near the watchband hinge.

The modern touches are a welcome change after seeing practically the same design for the last two years, but at the same time it feels like Lenovo went too far in certain respects. The leatherette interior was one of the most comfortable aspects of the Yoga 900 and now it has been replaced with cold aluminum sheet.

Thanks to the slimmer design, you also lose Lenovo's full-sized USB-A charging port in exchange for the new USB-C standard. That said, there are plenty of new elements to enjoy here including the a newly added fingerprint reader and one of the most impressive screens ever seen on a 13-inch.

Larger screen with none of the bulk

The Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 blew us away by packing full-size screen into smaller chassis, and now Lenovo is trying to capture the same magic with the Yoga 910.

The display panel size has been bumped up to 13.9-inches and a new 4K resolution without drastically increasing the size of the chassis. In fact, this laptop features some of the thinnest bezels we've ever seen on a Lenovo device.

This is thanks to slimming down the bezels along the top and sides while moving the webcam to the sizable chin beneath the screen. It effectively uses the same Infinity Screen layout first introduced by Dell and the only real discernable differences is Lenovo has placed the webcam in the center of the screen rather than off to the left.

That said, the Yoga 910 uses its clever convertible abilities to avoid displaying a worm's-eye view during video calls. Users can simply switch the laptop into tent mode and have it sit on its front edges to have a video camera that meets them at eye-level.

One downside to this new design is the bottom bezel is nearly two inches tall and largely featureless. Thanks to the webcam's positioning, Lenovo had to leave out a Windows button soft key, which would have added some much needed some flair to hybrid's extra-large chin.

Everything is new

Lenovo introduced plenty of other little tweaks here and there to make the Yoga 910 an even better laptop-tablet.

The keyboard, for example, no longer has any of those annoying right-handed shortcut keys to get in the way of you hitting the enter key. Meanwhile, the trackpad is appreciably larger and there's even a newly added fingerprint reader to help get you signed through Windows Hello with a simple finger press.

The Lenovo Yoga 910 features some bumped up specs including Intel's freshly announced Intel 7th generation processors with up to 1TB of PCIe SSD storage and 16GB of memory. Battery life has also seen a significant bump to 10.5 hours on UHD model and 15.5 hours with Full HD variants – but those are only estimates we plan to take to task.

Early verdict

The Lenovo Yoga 900 perfected the 2-in-1 laptop formula and now the Yoga 910 seeks to elevate the series to all new heights. There are plenty of welcome elements here including the larger screen, edgier design and revamped inputs. However, some of the changes aren't sitting well with us including the marginally higher price and the new bare metal keyboard deck.

In the past the Yoga 900 series has blended a good mix of affordability with performance, but this latest iteration may skew things too far into the luxury category. We'll have to see how the other configurations stack up as well as how this machine performs before we can deliver our final verdict, but we're optimistic that Lenovo has knocked it out of the park once again.