Lenovo Yoga 910 review: A hybrid laptop you won't want to put down

Many people still don't see the value of a touchscreen on a laptop, but with hybrid PCs like Lenovo's Yoga line it's hard not to appreciate the flexibility.

7.5

Lenovo Yoga 910

$1,199 at Amazon

The Good

The Lenovo Yoga 910 premium convertible has a gorgeous display that spans nearly the entire lid and delivers solid performance and long battery life for the category. It's a really cool looking laptop, too.

The Bad

The right-hand Shift key is poorly placed and sized. Webcam is at the bottom of the screen. No direct video output or SD card slot. Separate USB Type-C ports for power and video-out kill the option for a single connection all-in-one dock.

The Bottom Line

With a beautiful design, excellent performance and battery life and a great display, the Lenovo Yoga 910 is one head-turning hybrid.

The all-metal Yoga 910 is a perfect example of just how good a hybrid can be, too. Its compact size and relatively light weight is matched with an excellent 13.9-inch touchscreen that goes nearly edge-to-edge, which brings it closer to the look and feel of a regular tablet when folded back on itself.

Rotate the display around on its watchband-like 360-degree hinge and you've gone from a big screen tablet to a great ultraportable laptop. The hinge is stiff enough to hold the screen in any position, but moves freely enough you can adjust its angle with a single finger.

It might seem silly to be impressed by a hinge, but it works well, keeps the design as thin as possible and it looks cool. The hinge we've seen before on the 900 and the Yoga 3 Pro, but the display is a first for the line.

Available in full HD and 4K UHD resolutions, the multitouch display doesn't have the typical wide frame or bezel found on other laptops on the top and sides. This allowed Lenovo to fit a 13.9-inch screen into approximately the same space as a 13.3-inch display. Not only does it give you more room to work, but it looks great, too, with excellent brightness and color.

To make this design possible, Lenovo had to move the built-in webcam from above the screen to below it. It makes for some awkwardly large hands if you're typing and using the camera at the same time. Fortunately, you can flip the laptop over into a tent position and connect an external mouse and keyboard to keep working.

Typing on the laptop's backlit keyboard is generally good with one exception: The right-hand Shift key. With the 900 it was small and to the left of the Up arrow. Now it's to the right of the Up arrow and still too small. Typing with any amount of speed inevitably resulted in the cursor moving somewhere it didn't belong. You might be able to adjust to the key size and placement over time, but I found it beyond frustrating.

The touchpad, on the other hand, is just about perfect. Fingers glide easily over its smooth surface, and I never experienced any cursor jumps caused by a brush from my palm. There are multitouch gestures that are easily adjusted within Windows' settings, so if you're not a fan of pinch-to-zoom or three-finger swipes you can just turn them off.

Lenovo Yoga 910 is a head turner in more ways than one

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Like many new ultraportables, the 910 moves away from standard USB Type-A ports in favor of smaller multipurpose USB Type-C. You get one USB 2.0 Type-C for data and charging the laptop, and one USB 3.0 Type-C for data and video-out via an adapter (not included). However, since the latter can't handle charging as well, there is no single-cable adapter option for data, video and power.

You also won't find a direct video output like HDMI or an SD card slot, either. There is one standard USB 3.0 port, though, and it has always-on charging so you can keep your phone or tablet juiced up even when the computer is off.

The Yoga 910 currently starts at around $1,000 (or AU$1,999 in Australia), which gets you a full HD touchscreen, a 256GB SSD for storage and 8GB of memory. My $1,300 system has double the storage and memory and a 4K UHD display. While the SSD appears to be upgradable (though doing so will likely void your warranty), the memory is not, so you'll want to buy with that in mind. The Yoga 910 is not yet available in the UK, but the Australian starting price converts to roughly £1,180.

In general, performance is excellent with no real bottlenecks for processor-intensive tasks. This isn't a system for demanding games, though, and 4K video files didn't play back smoothly. That said, YouTube and Netflix 4K streams looked good. Basically, this isn't a system for anything too graphically challenging.

In our online streaming battery test, the 910's battery life is impressive at 8 hours. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar surpassed this lasting 10 hours. However, I was able to work on it while streaming music for just under 10 hours, so with mixed use I'd expect the truth to be somewhere between the two.

A premium hybrid you won't want to put down

The Lenovo Yoga is an overall excellent laptop. The screen and the design are definitely the highlights here, but it just delivers a great experience whether you use it as a tablet, laptop or anything in between.