Smaller, flexible convertible PC needs either Haswell or a time machine.
Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga lineup started with two laptops. One, the Yoga 13, is a 13-inch Intel Ultrabook that runs Windows 8. The other, the Yoga 11, is a Tegra 3 laptop running Windows RT.
The problem for Lenovo is that Windows RT hasn’t really gone anywhere aside from those devices launched alongside Windows 8 (which included the Yoga and a handful of other convertibles and tablets, most notably Microsoft’s own Surface). If you want to know how well the ARM-based convertible did for Lenovo, well, the company no longer sells it directly.
That leaves a hole in the Yoga lineup, and it’s a hole that the new Yoga 11S is supposed to fill. It takes an 11-inch chassis similar to the standard Yoga 11 but adds Ivy Bridge-based Intel processors similar to those used by the Yoga 13. If the 11S had launched alongside the Yoga 13 in the first place, it would be easy to recommend to people who liked the Yoga line’s signature flexible hinge but wanted something lighter. As it is, the laptop feels a few months late, and it fixes none of the minor issues we had with the 13-inch model back in November.
Body and build quality
Visually, the Yoga 11S is in every way a smaller version of the Yoga 13. We were fans of the larger version’s style, and that style has been retained here. The top and bottom of the laptop are a somewhat soft-feeling gray plastic (the laptop is also available in a bright “Clementine Orange”) that sort of looks like aluminum but isn’t. The palm rest is a more rubberized black plastic—the texture is different from the 13-inch model, but it’s still quite fetching.
The laptop’s body isn’t tapered like some Ultrabooks, so it may appear slightly thicker or boxier than offerings like the MacBook Air or Asus ZenBook Prime. It’s still thin—0.67 inches, just like the 13-inch model—but that thickness is constant throughout the body of the laptop. At 3.06 pounds, it’s lighter than the 3.4 pound Yoga 13 but a bit heavier than the 2.38 and 2.96 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air, the 2.43 and 2.86 pounds of the 11-inch and 13-inch ZenBook Prime, or the 2.97 pounds of the touch-enabled 13-inch Kirabook. Even with the smaller model, you’re looking at a laptop that outweighs the 13-inch versions of many of its competitors.
The 10-point touchscreen is both smaller and lower in resolution than the larger Yoga (1366×768, down from 1600×900), but it retains the larger version’s excellent color and viewing angles. The screen also has a much larger bezel than in other Ultrabooks we’ve seen, which gives you a bit more room to grip the Yoga 11S if you’re using it as a tablet. A physical Windows button is embedded below the screen.
The main draw of the Yoga lineup is its flippable hinge, which works exactly the same in both models. There are four “modes” that Lenovo advertises, of which two are functionally very similar: “Stand” and “Tent” mode are both designed to let you put the Yoga on a surface (flat or otherwise) and interact exclusively with the touchscreen. We commented in our last Yoga review that doing this left the (deactivated) keyboard and trackpad either pressed against your desk or exposed. But Lenovo has partially rectified that with the 11S by offering a $29 optional slip case that covers up the keys when they’re not in use.
This case is also useful in tablet mode, where it makes the 11S a bit less ungainly to hold. The 11S does make a better tablet than the larger Yoga 13, but its three-pound weight still means you won’t want to use it with one hand for very long. It makes a serviceable tablet if rested against your lap or another surface, though, not entirely unlike “pure” tablets equipped with Ivy Bridge (see Acer’s Iconia W700). An iPad it isn’t, but it’s at least plausible as a tablet for certain use cases.
Finally, there’s laptop mode, in which it’s difficult to tell the Yoga apart from any other Ultrabook. This was one of the best things about the larger Yoga, which distinguished itself from other early convertibles by not screwing up the standard laptop functionality. The 11S doesn’t mess with this formula; its trackpad is slightly smaller and its keyboard makes some concessions to fit the laptop’s smaller chassis (several keys have moved and some have been resized a bit compared to the 13-inch model), but we’re still looking at a mostly full-sized chiclet keyboard like the one found in other IdeaPad laptops.
That said, the IdeaPad keyboards still aren’t my favorite. There’s no backlight here, and the travel is slightly less satisfying than in recent keyboards from Asus, Apple, and even Lenovo itself. Lenovo’s ThinkPad keyboards are similar to the IdeaPad keyboards in appearance and layout, but the travel is much better and there’s a very slight scoop to the keys that matches the contours of one’s fingers. The trackpad, even with the most recent drivers, was serviceable but tweaky. It wasn’t uncommon for clicks to be misinterpreted every once in awhile, especially when performing two-fingered operations like clicking and dragging.
As for ports and other peripherals, the Yoga 11S is again just about the same as the larger version. The stereo speakers (located on the sides) put out the same tinny sound that you’d expect from any laptop, but they and the laptop’s webcam are both perfectly serviceable. The presence of an HDMI port is welcome, but less welcome is the laptop’s mix of one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port. Ivy Bridge’s chipset supports up to four of the faster ports, and plenty of Ultrabooks have gone all-in on USB 3.0 at this point; Lenovo doesn’t have much of an excuse here.
The hardware, then, is very much a shrunken-down version of the Yoga 13. On the software side, Lenovo’s Windows 8 comes with plenty of pre-installed junk, though it’s all pretty easy to uninstall if you don’t want it. McAfee’s antivirus product leads the charge, and it should be uninstalled in favor of Microsoft’s generally serviceable built-in product. There’s also an add-on that makes presentation and video software run in full-screen when the screen is tilted into stand or tent mode, and one that will let you switch music tracks or turn e-book pages by swiping your hand in front of the screen. As usual, most of these “value-adds” are of questionable value, and you’ll want to uninstall most or simply reinstall Windows entirely (though this shouldn’t be necessary, as none of the software is particularly invasive).
Internals and performance
The Yoga 11S uses Intel’s last-generation Ivy Bridge CPUs, but in a slightly different configuration than we’re used to—this is one of the Y-series CPUs that the company revealed back at CES. This series (which is being continued in the Haswell lineup) is similar in performance and power consumption to the U-series chips used in most Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks, but both the speed and the power consumption has been reduced slightly. The common Core i5-3317U, for example, runs at 1.7GHz and has a TDP of 17W, while the Core i7-3689Y in our 11S review unit runs at 1.5GHz and has a TDP of 13W. The integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU is the same in both chips, but its max clock speed is 850Mhz in the Y-series parts versus 1050MHz in most of the U-series parts.
We won’t go overboard benchmarking this processor, but we ran some quick Geekbench and Cinebench tests on it to show the performance relative to some other Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks. The performance deficits compared to two U-series Ivy Bridge chips (a 1.7GHz i5-3317U and a 1.9GHz i7-3517U) reveal performance deficits roughly in line with what you’d expect from a lower-clocked version of the same architecture. Note that the gap will widen a little more if you choose the cheaper Core i3 or Core i5 options; the clock speeds between the three are similar, but the i3 gives up the benefits bestowed by Turbo Boost entirely, and the i5 option has a lower Turbo Boost speed of 2.0GHz rather than the 2.6GHz supported by the i7-3689Y here.
Note that the CPU memory scores in Geekbench are a bit lower than they should be. The Yoga 11S has just one RAM slot, so its 1600MHz DDR3 is running in single-channel mode rather than dual-channel mode.
The laptop also comes with Bluetooth 4.0, but it’s unfortunately paired with 2.4GHz-only 802.11n. This was the case with the Yoga 13, and it continues to bother us—no non-bargain-bin laptop in 2013 should come without 5GHz Wi-Fi, preferably in at least a two stream configuration (combining two 150Mbps data streams for a combined 300Mbps of theoretical performance). It’s too early to expect 802.11ac in every Ultrabook just yet, but 802.11n constricted to the 2.4GHz band will put a crimp in your network Wi-Fi performance.
The SSD brings better news. One of our biggest gripes about the 13-inch Yoga was that only half of its 128GB SSD was actually used to create the operating system partition. More than 50 of those gigabytes were consumed by various system and restore partitions not present in a “clean” install of Windows from a retail DVD or USB drive.
Whatever decisions led Lenovo to carve up its drive like that in the 13-inch model appear to have been reversed for the 11-inch model. The 256GB SSD in our review unit devotes only about 15GB to its recovery partition, still a significant amount if you get a 128GB drive but much more forgivable than before.
The SSD itself is a Samsung PM841-based mSATA drive that uses a SATA III interface (Crystal Disk Info reports that it is in fact SATA III, despite the Lenovo product page’s insistence that it’s actually SATA II). Samsung’s SSDs are widely used and very reliable, and the PM841 should be just a bit faster than the Samsung 830-based drive that shipped with the 13-inch model we tested last year. General performance is fast and consistent, as is to be expected from a modern SSD.
As for upgradeability, if you remove two Torx screws from the bottom of the laptop, you can pry the keyboard up with some effort (as was also possible on the Yoga 13). This will reveal the Yoga 11S’ single RAM slot, which comes with either 4GB or 8GB of RAM by default. There’s no additional RAM soldered to the motherboard as in the 13-inch model, so whatever you can fit into this slot will be all of the memory that the system can use. We were uncomfortable taking the laptop apart past this point, but the SSD and Wi-Fi cards are usually also replaceable in laptops like this if you’re more comfortable tearing it up.
Battery life
Because the batteries get smaller along with everything else, 11-inch laptops tend to give up some battery life compared to their larger counterparts. Despite its more power-efficient CPU, the Yoga 11S is no exception.
With the laptop’s screen set to 50 percent brightness and the automatic brightness sensor disabled, the Yoga 11S managed to last for about four and a half hours of general use (browsing the Web, listening to music, and generally poking around the interface). Your mileage will vary depending on your usage, but this is well short of Lenovo’s quoted six hours and on the low end of average for the product category. In some cases, you may get slightly better battery life out of the slower Core i3 or Core i5s in the lower-end models, but they’re not likely to close the gap between Lenovo’s promised figure and the actual one.
This seems like the kind of laptop that could really be improved by Haswell. If the 2013 MacBook Air is any indication, the U- and Y-series Haswell chips could give the Yoga a decent battery life boost while offering either equivalent or better CPU and GPU performance. The 11S isn’t bad, but smaller laptops especially can really make good use of the improvements promised by the next-generation CPUs.
Day late, dollar short
The Yoga 13 was one of our favorite Windows 8 laptops in the operating system’s launch lineup. It wasn’t a particularly great tablet (and neither is the 11S, though the smaller size and the slip cover help), but it didn’t compromise its functionality as a laptop to add the convertible functionality. Large-ish bezel aside, the Yoga’s convertible mechanism is still great.
Now, though, the 11S feels like it either should have been shipped eight or nine months ago with the first wave of Windows 8 hardware or months from now with Haswell chips instead of the Y-series Ivy Bridge CPUs. It’s hard to see why Lenovo waited to use the Y-series CPUs in this laptop at all given that other 11-inch Ultrabooks with similar battery life have been shipping with the U-series CPUs since back in the days of Sandy Bridge. It’s not like the Yoga is pushing the boundaries of size or thickness, either—its profile and its heft give more than one 13-inch Ultrabook a run for its money.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the 11S was something that Lenovo began considering only once it was clear that Windows RT (and, by extension, the original Tegra 3-based Yoga 11) was getting off to a bad start. Unfortunately, Lenovo didn’t take the extra time to address any of our gripes with the Yoga 13: you still have that one USB 2.0 port and 2.4GHz 802.11n and a keyboard without a backlight, all of which feel like omissions compared to other Ultrabooks from Lenovo’s competitors.
The second wave of Windows 8 hardware looks promising. OEMs have gone back to the drawing board and come up with improved versions of their original designs. Unfortunately, as much as we continue to like the Yoga’s hinge, the 11S feels like a first-wave Windows 8 laptop released a few months too late. Wake us up when the Yogas get Haswell.
The good
- The Yoga’s flexible hinge makes it one of our favorite convertible designs
- Attractive, understated design
- Decent keyboard, if not quite as good as a ThinkPad
- Screen has excellent color and viewing angles, and the resolution is OK at this size
- HDMI port and SD card reader
- RAM is upgradeable and relatively easy to access
The bad
- One USB 2.0 port—it’s time to embrace USB 3.0 already
- Slightly lower performance than the Yoga 13
- Poor battery life
- No backlit keyboard option
The ugly
- Haswell is here, and it would be perfect for the 11S—too bad it’s stuck on Ivy Bridge
by Andrew Cunningham @ http://arstechnica.com
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