Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260 review – A seriously agile laptop

The keyboard and touchpad are routinely the high point of ThinkPad-branded devices and the Yoga 260 is no exception. The backlit keys have had to shrink a little to squeeze into the compact chassis, but the wide channels and slightly concave, matte key caps feel absolutely lovely to type on. This might be a small laptop, but there’s almost as much movement to each keystroke as on a full-sized desktop keyboard.

Fans of the ThinkPad touchpoint and touchpad combination will be happy to see them on show here. The buttonless touchpad may not be to everyone’s tastes, but you can always reach upwards to use the touchpoint’s discrete buttons if it bothers you at all. I had no qualms with either, however. The touchpad presses down with a nice, crisp click, and the touchpoint just does exactly what you’d expect of it, providing accurate, reliable cursor control.

Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260: Display and touchscreen

While the cheapest Yoga 260 slums it with a 1,366 x 768 touchscreen, the pricier models come with a 1,920 x 1,080 IPS panel. And, in a move that will doubtless please many business customers, Lenovo has opted for a matte anti-glare finish, so overhead lights cause no annoying reflections at all. The downside is that images do look a touch grainy, but it’s no big deal.

Coming after the luscious high-DPI screen on the Dell XPS 13, though, the Yoga 260’s image quality is a tad lacking in other areas. Colours aren’t anywhere near as saturated as most rivals at the price, and this is borne out in our display tests: the sRGB coverage of 61.8% is poor. Brightness hits a respectable maximum of 380cd/m2, and a contrast ratio of 1,255:1 is similarly competent, it’s just a shame Lenovo couldn’t have squeezed a more vibrant palette out the Yoga 260’s panel.

In fairness, though, the Yoga 260 does make amends with its stylus support, and this is arguably much more important to its target audience. The ThinkPad Pen Pro trumps many of its rivals solely because it docks into the laptop itself (take that, Microsoft), but it’s also technically pretty sound, delivering 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity. In use, it isn’t as comfy as Microsoft’s Surface Pen to use, purely because it’s thinner and shorter, but for the brief bursts of note-taking that styluses most often get used for, it’s absolutely fine, providing smooth, sensitive inking action.

Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260: Conclusion

The ThinkPad Yoga 260 tugs at my purse-strings in a way that few other business laptops do. It’s a great size and weight for carrying around every day, doesn’t compromise with a rubbish keyboard or touchpad, and the combination of the ingenious Yoga design, ThinkPad build quality and a decent stylus make for a fantastically versatile machine.

In short, there’s only one major flaw with the Yoga 260 and that’s its display. The limited colour palette means that it simply isn’t good enough for photo editing or design work, which may be a deal-breaker for some people. If that doesn’t bother you in the slightest, though, then you can break out the business credit card with confidence. The ThinkPad Yoga 260 is a tough, versatile and compact hybrid that’s worth every penny.