- I recently reviewed a Lenovo X1 Carbon
but let's take it up a notch today with the X1 Yoga.
It's now available and today I'll tell you what's good
and what's bad.
Stay tuned.
(electronic music)
So before we get started
let me talk a little bit about the Yoga.
This is the third generation version
versus the Carbon which is now in its sixth generation.
And these are basically sister devices.
And what's really cool here
is years ago when convertibles came out
there was a huge choice you had to make.
You could get the convertible
but you had to sacrifice a lot of performance and features
or you could get the nonconvertible
and get all the cool stuff.
That's changed now.
2018 you can basically get the same laptop
but one that's a convertible and one that's not.
So the choice is up to you.
And that's kind of what we have here.
Now there are some subtle differences
and I'll go over those at the end of the video
if you have to choose between the Carbon and the Yoga.
Let's get into the Yoga's feature set and see what's new.
So here it is.
The X1 Yoga for 2018.
And there's a lot to like about this device.
This is a premium business Ultrabook
that's also convertible and also has a pen.
And so it's for a specific group of users out there
but there's a lot to like here.
First of all, let's talk about this display.
So like all Lenovo stuff you get a lot of options.
You can do full HD
and of course go up to WQHD
and now you can also get the Adobe HDR version
just like you can on the Carbon.
And that's what we find here.
This HDR display can do all sorts of neat things
including go up to 500 nits of brightness
and color accuracy is superb.
Just like on a Carbon, we're getting 100% sRGB
and 100 Adobe RGB,
which I've never really seen in any laptop before.
So this is a very color accurate screen.
It's great for people who work in video
or just want to do photo editing
or just really want something that looks great for movies.
Now unlike the Carbon, there's two differences here
with this display.
First of all, you can get it with touch
and that makes sense since this uses a pen.
Also, it's non-gloss.
Now it is a little bit glossy
but compared to the Carbon, this one is much better.
Just way less reflection.
So those are two core differences with this display
that makes it a bit different.
Now the other thing is the bezel.
This has obviously got a large bezel compared to the Carbon
and that's fine.
This is meant to be a tablet too
and that's the reason for it.
Let's take a look here at the Yoga's deck.
So you got the standard Lenovo keyboard,
although this is called the Wave keyboard
and we'll show you why when it converts
to a tablet later on.
But it's the same layout as the Carbon
and the response time is very good on this.
Feels very much like the Carbon
but it is slightly softer.
That's not good or bad.
It's just slightly different
but I actually really like typing on this
just as much as I do on the Carbon.
Coming down to the trackpad area,
you do have a slightly larger trackpad compared
to the Carbon and that's
because it's just got a wider footprint here.
You also have the buttons here for the TrackPoint system.
This is a full precision touchpad so it's very good.
Again nice soft click.
I really like what Lenovo has done here
with their trackpad pure Precision drivers.
No more synaptic, very good.
Finally we do have the standard fingerprint reader
and if you saw in my Carbon review,
I'm not a fan of this fingerprint reader.
It works, it works with when it's low.
You get a cool LED there.
It's just, it's kind of a pain to use.
You get to put your finger on there
and it takes a few seconds to read.
Your smartphone is gonna be way better than this
so I wish they would do a better fingerprint reader
but it works.
You also have the new ThinkPad logo
so again, nice black, very minimal
and just modern looking.
I think it looks excellent
and you have a little LED that lights up as well.
So pretty cool design.
Coming to the exterior of the device,
and you look at that deep, deep black
that Lenovo's really known for, the ThinkPad line.
Again, new logo, system looks really excellent here.
Now if you don't like this color
and you really want to be young and brash
you can go for the new silver version.
I would actually prefer the silver.
I know that's sacrilege for a lot of Lenovo people
but the problem with the black one
is it does pick up a lot of fingerprints and grease.
For some people,
you're gonna have to wipe this down frequently
if that bothers you.
Otherwise, you can get this or stick with the silver version
which won't have that issue.
All right, let's take a look at ports here.
So on the left side we have two USB type-C.
Again, Thunderbolt three, full four PCI-E lanes.
That means you can use an external GPU with this.
Wouldn't necessarily use this laptop for gaming
but you totally can.
Most games today are GPU dependent
so you can plug this into a Razor Core
with a GeForce 1080 Ti and you'd do really well.
It'd just be super expensive.
USB Type A on this side here.
Flipping around to the right hand side,
you still have a full HDMI jack here.
Now you don't get the full port replicator
that's found on a Carbon.
That's a difference.
You also have another standard USB 3.1 port here.
And you do have this little Ethernet port
that doesn't look like an Ethernet one
because there's a dongle that Lenovo will sell you.
You also have the three
and a half millimeter headphone jack
and the power button on the side.
After all, this turns into a tablet
so you'll want to make sure
that power button is always accessible.
So that's another difference between this and the Carbon.
All right, let's start talking
about what really makes this laptop unique.
And first of all, it's gonna be this thing here.
This is the pen, pulls right out of the chassis.
And this is an inherently cool thing.
This makes a lot of difference for me
as someone who doesn't use a pen
but wants to have one on occasion (laughs).
So it's an active pen
so when you put it into the system here
it actually charges it up.
In fact, that's about 15 seconds of being in there.
It'll be charged for, I believe it's 100 minutes,
which is just kinda weird.
In other words, it'll always be charged
if you just throw it in there for a few seconds,
you're always good.
But it's just really nice to pull it out there.
And for those curious, it is a Wacom AES system
so it is different than what surface uses
which is N'trig.
That means you can't take a surface pen
and use it on this device but it's its own system.
Wacom AES is very popular, it's a very good system.
Has very good response time.
You're talking about 2,048 levels of pressure.
That fits in between what HP uses at 1,028 levels
and of course what the new Surface Pro
and Surface Book use, which is over 4,000 levels.
So it's a very good pen though
and we'll show more of that soon.
Turn to the bottom, nothing unique here.
You do have your intake vents as well as a bunch of screws.
You can remove this panel
and swap out the SSD if you want to,
but you probably don't want to.
It's a very good SSD.
You also have your speakers here on the bottom.
You can see some on the bottom, some on the edge.
Better speaker system than the Carbon though
and that's actually a big difference
between the two of these.
Okay, let's have all specifications and features.
Like all of Lenovo's stuff,
you can configure this however you want.
So you're getting an Intel Core i5 Processor here,
that is the eighth generation.
It is quad-core but again 15 watt here.
And you're going to get all sorts
of cool benefits with that,
especially for a multi-core performance.
You go up to a Core i7, and just like the Carbon,
you're gonna get two options there.
You can get the 8550U, which is pretty standard,
or you can go for a 8650U, which is the more powerful one.
That's also found in the Surface Book 2.
That thing can clock up to 4.2 gigahertz
and it's an outstanding processor.
That's also the one that comes with vPro
and if you had to choose one,
it would be that.
For RAM we will get eight or 16 gig configurations.
Nothing unique there.
DDR3, 2133 megahertz so pretty good RAM.
That is the low power one so it helps the battery life.
I know some people ask me why these don't ship a DDR4.
DDR4 is awesome
but it's also not very good for batter life,
not yet at least.
So that's why companies still use DDR3.
Now when it comes to storage you get 256, 512
or up to one terabyte if you want to, SSD PCIe.
Again, this one is using the Samsung PM981 chip in there.
That's an awesome SSD, folks.
I didn't even know actually it existed
until a couple weeks ago.
It is one of the first laptops that feature it
and you're talking over 3,000 for the read speeds
and over 2,000 for writes.
Really good performance here.
You can swap it out of course
but I seen no reason why you'd want to.
Now when it comes to wireless options,
you're gonna get an Intel 80 265 chip in here.
That's a very good one for Wi-Fi and a Bluetooth.
And just like all things Lenovo,
later on they will be offering LTE Advanced option
with the modem built in there.
I wish you could order that right now.
Apparently you can't so you just have to wait for it
but if you want that one,
you can definitely get that as well.
Okay, let's talk about battery and performance.
So in the Yoga you're talking 850 for a watt r battery.
That's slightly smaller than what's found in a Carbon
but that's okay.
It's not a big deal here.
Now you're still talking around 8 hours of battery life,
that's with the Core i7 and this full HDR display.
Now that's gonna vary depending obviously
what you're doing and whether or not you're
ramping that display up to 500 nits,
which would drain the battery much quicker.
But for normal office usage and productivity stuff,
yeah, you're getting around eight hours.
Maybe even more if you put that brightness down.
This does have USB fast charge as well
and it's a 65 watt charger which is really nice.
So it's not big and it'll allow you
to charge this up pretty quickly.
So let's talk about the banner feature of the Yoga.
Well, it converts into a tablet
and what's really neat about this design
is like I said,
years ago there used to be a lot of compromise.
But you can buy this device,
use it as a laptop 98% of the time.
And just once in a while,
when you want to flip to presentation mode
or turn to a tablet,
well, you get that feature here.
And that's what's really neat about it.
So you get this thing called a Wave keyboard.
It's sort of Lenovo's little trick here
that when you flip it over,
the keys retract into its body.
So when you're holding it, you don't feel the buttons.
And that sounds like not a big deal
but it actually is a big deal
for making this feel much more like a tablet when in use.
Now of course you also get that pen.
Now this pen is pretty small
and it's not something you want to use longterm.
And if you're an artist you probably don't want
to use it either.
But if you're going to use it to say highlight stuff
in a document or sign a document,
it is awesome to have.
I really like it.
Now don't forget, it is Wacom AES
so you can buy Lenovo's bigger pen to carry around with you
or use the Wacom Bamboo Ink pen
that's available now as well.
And that works totally well.
You just would have to carry it separately,
there's no way you can attach, or trade off.
Now using this as a tablet is actually pretty fun.
It's about a half pound heavier than the Carbon
at three pounds and that's a little bit of a difference
but it's not too bad.
I really liked using this though say in presentation mode.
When you go to watch a movie,
you can flip that screen around
and that's also cool too
because the bottom of a laptop can get a little warm.
So let's talk about thermals.
It's not a hot laptop per say.
The 8th generation stuff is very good.
But it gets a little bit warm.
But now if you flip it to presentation mode
to watch a movie, well you don't have that issue, right?
Plus your speakers now fire upwards
and the audio is already very good on this
compared to the Carbon.
I like these speakers a lot.
All right, buying decision time.
If you had to buy one, the Carbon or the Yoga,
which would it be?
Surprisingly, I'm gonna go with the Yoga
and the reason I say surprisingly
is I'm never really into convertible devices.
They're cool, they're neat
but I'm totally fine with the standard laptop.
Even Surface Book 2, which I love,
is something I just keep as a laptop
almost all the time.
Having said that, there are some real benefits
to the Yoga over the Carbon.
For instance, the display is more anti-glare.
And to me that's actually a big deal.
It's also of course touch
and you can't get the HDR version in touch
for some reason on the Carbon.
Now I'm not a huge pen user myself
but having this little thing built
into the side of the device, it's super cool.
When I wanna sign a document quickly
or just highlight something
or even just draw, it's just nice to have.
And I don't feel like you're compromising anything
by having it built in.
The keyboard deck is also larger.
You get a little bit more room here for your palms.
And again, that's a comfort issue.
I find typing on this just a little bit better
because I have more room for my wrists.
You also get a slightly larger trackpad,
and again, it's a nice difference to have.
I would rather have a larger trackpad than not.
Now I would be totally find getting rid
of the TrackPoint system and making it even larger
without those buttons,
but I won't touch that one.
I know a lot of you will revolt against it.
Still though, overall, this is a better device.
Now it is heavier and it is slightly more expensive
so this starts around $1,400, $1,450.
That's for the Core i5 and 256.
For the HDR display, it's an extra $180,
but I think if you had to choose one,
you'd get much more longevity out of this device.
And if I had to pick one myself,
I'd probably configure it as the silver with the Core i7
and I'd wait for that LTE model.
That's me.
I may actually order that though.
This is just a really cool device.
I think you'd get a lot of longevity out of it.
So there's a quick look at the new X1 Yoga 3rd Generation.
Now if you have any questions about this device,
leave 'em in the comments below.
If you want more information,
you can find it in the description
or you can also find my full review at Windows Central.
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Thanks for watching, take care everybody.