[Review] Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 Pro – it’s yoga for electronics

Lenovo’s first ever Yoga laptop was amazing. Everyone was bedazzled by what it can do, and it really does live up to its name by Yoga-ing all over the place and does all the poses you want it to do.

After that, some time has passed and Lenovo unleashed the new Yoga 2. I got my hands on the Yoga 2 Pro – which is definitely exciting.

Before we begin the review, here’s the quick spec rundown of the variant of the Yoga 2 Pro that I have for my testing session.

• 13.3-inch IPS LED display with 3200×1800 resolution (QHD+)
• Intel Core i5-4200U running at 1.6GHz each
• Intel HD Graphics 4400
• 4GB RAM
• 128GB storage

The package design is rather simple and thin, and is with minimalistic colour and flashy graphics on it. It shows what it needs to show – like the Yoga’s 360º screen rotation and the 4 officially supported modes – Laptop, Tent, Stand, and Tablet mode.

Opening the box we find the IdeaPad Yoga 2 Pro enclosed within a pouch. Also note that the Yoga 2 Pro fits just nicely with the corners of the laptops touching the box.

Opening the pouch, we got the IdeaPad Yoga out.

Digging deeper, there are compartments for the power brick, the cables, and also the instruction manual.

A pretty normal unboxing experience – everything is kept minimalistically simple and beautiful.

[nextpage title=”Ports and buttons”]The Yoga 2 Pro is after all a tablet. It has all of the buttons as the previous Yoga which are as below.

On the left side of the Yoga 2 Pro, there’s the charger port, a USB 3.0 port, a micro-HDMI out, and a card reader. The picture did not show the ports well as everything was black in colour.

On the right side of the Yoga 2 Pro, there’s a power indicator light alongside with the power switch, a autorotate lock button, the volume rocker, headphone/microphone combo jack and also a USB 2.0 port.

At the back, there’s a row of ventilation grills for the most obvious reasons.

The microphone however is placed at a rather awkward place. I suppose Lenovo expects the Yoga 2 Pro to be used in either the Tent or Stand mode while doing online video calls. Having the microphones at the bottom while doing voice calls will subject to voice reflections and degrading call quality.

Lastly, there is nothing at the front.

[nextpage title=”Design and build quality”]

The Yoga 2 Pro is one of the most beautiful, thinnest laptop ever made. Have you ever looked at the device with your own eyes?

The entire laptop is this thick. It’s only about 1.5cm thick. Yes, one point five freaking centimeters.

The design of the Yoga 2 Pro is minimalistically simple, with the faux leather-like texture wrapping around the entire device – from the sides of the keyboard to the lid and also the bottom side of the laptop.

That leads me to the build quality of this thin device.

The Yoga 2 Pro also has the best ever hinge mechanism on any laptops – ever. It looks really sleek and simple – two pieces of these things that connects the screen and the other parts together. When you turn the device over to some other modes, the hinge will show its two-part rotation mechanism and nicely turns along.

You don’t need any extra force to turn rotate the screen, and you don’t even have to worry about the screen getting damaged. Grabbing the top left corner and the top right corner and flexing the screen, the Yoga 2 Pro showed top-notch sturdiness across the screen. The same goes for the keyboard.

[nextpage title=”Screen and touchscreen”]

The Yoga 2 Pro offers the most exciting screen in the world of computers today. A QHD+ – meaning 3200×1800 pixels – is just amazing. Native 1080p content shows up as just about one-fourth on the screen. Another thing to note is that the screen can be freakishly bright to the point that it hurts the eyes.

Watching movies on the Yoga 2 Pro was absolutely amazing – especially when you have native 4K video content, which I have tried a few on the Yoga 2 Pro.

Combined with the 360º rotatable screen, I watched movies and read notes and books at the weirdest angles and positions ever – and all these are only possible with the Yoga’s rotating screen.

The touchscreen capability works magnificently accurate, just as expected. There’s nothing much to talk about the touchscreen except that the glass surface was very comfortable to glide my finger across.

[nextpage title=”Keyboard and trackpad”]

The only one minor problem that I nitpicked on the Yoga 2 Pro and that is the keyboard. The spacing is fine, the button placements are fine – even the multimedia keys offered are okay – but the height of the keys are a little too low for any tactile that I’m used to. It did take quite some time for me to get used to this level of key height, which was then proven to be quite comfortable to type on.

Lenovo also didn’t leave out one of the important feature – that is a backlit keyboard. I found out that the backlight is a little unevenly spreaded, as certain keys are brighter than other keys, like the N and X button are brighter than everything else.

The trackpad was a little too small compared to my usual laptop, but then again I got used to the fact that the Yoga 2 Pro has a touchscreen, and I used that more than the trackpad throughout my entire review session. The trackpad is again smooth and my finger glides across comfortably, albeit a little smaller than what I got used to.[nextpage title=”Comfort and portability”]The strongest point of the Yoga 2 Pro – comfort across any viewing positions.

If you’re tall, the Yoga 2 Pro’s infinite tilting angle will surely be comfortable to you, unlike the ThinkPad Helix. As said before, the Yoga 2 Pro officially supports 4 modes – Tent, Laptop, Stand, and Tablet – but what you didn’t know is that there are a whole lot more modes that the IdeaPad Yoga 2 Pro can do, such as this :

Obviously it’s not going to be comfortable to be used on the table like this, but it’s meant for lazy people like me who wants to browse the web and Facebook while lying on my bed with my head on the pillow. Or maybe just to watch movie on the bed while I sleep.

As for the portability, the 13.3-inch size laptop is really thin and light – carrying the Yoga 2 Pro throughout the entire day in my bag feels as if I didn’t bring the laptop out at all. Sometimes I got some minor heart attacks and thought that the Yoga 2 Pro was stolen from my bag and I had to make sure that it didn’t.

[nextpage title=”Performance”]There is absolutely nothing much to expect from the i5 ULV processor. Though it is using Iris Pro graphics, the performance offered was as expected from any typical ULV processors as shown below.

By using DiRT 3’s performance benchmarker, it showed that the Yoga 2 Pro can achieve only 17fps at 3200×1800 pixels resolution with the graphics settings being tuned to the lowest.

On 1080 resolution however, the Yoga 2 Pro’s Intel HD 4400 can achieve up to 25fps on the lowest graphic settings. It’s obviously proven that the Intel HD 4400 is not up for any 3D games.

On Windows Experience Index, it has shown that the limiting factor for any intensive task is the graphics.

Obviously I’m not going to benchmark this device any further as it is not meant to be anything near a powerhouse or a gaming machine.

[nextpage title=”Battery and charger”]

The power brick thin and small, and outputs 65 watts of power. With that said, you can expect the power brick to not heat up to an untouchable degree when you’re charging the Yoga 2 Pro or while performing intense tasks.

The power brick is rather light and comfortable to be carried around – though I never did once used it since I brought it out.  The battery life on the Yoga 2 Pro can last for 7 hours under heavy WiFi usage – that is with Chrome, specifically for YouTube, web browsing and generally Facebook.

A job well done by Lenovo here. 7 hours on such a thin laptop!

[nextpage title=”Upgradability and maintenance”]Technically, you can remove the backplate of the Yoga 2 Pro, but that wouldn’t serve any purpose at all as everything is hardwired – that means the RAM chips and SSD chips are soldered on the board itself and are non-removeable, making upgradability impossible.

You can however remove the backplate just to clean the insides.

[nextpage title=”Wrap up”]

The Yoga 2 Pro is something much more than just a laptop – it’s a everything there is to be. It serves the general purpose of a laptop and also a recreational tablet, and can even become a bookreader due to its light weight. If you can somehow want to use the Yoga 2 Pro in some weird positions, by all means please  do try – the Yoga 2 Pro will work.

But then again – what’s the price?

Price

The Yoga 2 Pro retails at a recommended price of RM4,199, and you can obviously find somewhere else with cheaper price – if you know where to search.

So, given the price and after reviewing each and every aspects of the Yoga 2 Pro that really mattered to me, what does that all lead to?

Conclusion

The Yoga 2 Pro is an absolutely fantastic device to be used. You can just use it anywhere, any time for any occasion. And why would I say that?

• Pros
  • Great battery life
  • Great, beautiful and bright screen
  • Endless tilting angle
  • Magnificent build quality
  • Very light and thin
• Cons
  • Keyboard key height are a little low

Basically, I have no complaints about the Yoga 2 Pro – at least on Lenovo’s side. All the other complaints I have is based on how horrible Microsoft made Windows and how horrible Windows supports touchscreens.

Rating : 9/10

The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 Pro deserves such a high score because of what Lenovo did to really improve and address issues faced by the predecessor. Screen resolution has been bumped up, the colour changed, the build quality is amazing. Lenovo really left not much room to complain at all.

Though who is it for? The Yoga 2 Pro is practically for everyone as I can imagine. Even my mom spent time using the Yoga 2 Pro. I spent time to watch movies on the Yoga 2 Pro instead of using my LG TV because of the magnificent screen. I brought the Yoga 2 Pro to everywhere I go because of the weight and thinness.

Frankly speaking, the Yoga 2 Pro was an instant replacement as a daily driver for portability. I even did my assignment on that thing.

Sadly the Yoga 2 Pro I reviewed was a loan unit. If it isn’t, I’d keep it for my own use for sure.

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