Lenovo Yoga 900S review: Treading lightly

Keyboard and touchpad

The Yoga 900S’ keyboard is equally problematic. There’s very little travel here, and it’s just not as pleasant to type on as other £1,000 laptops like the Dell XPS 13. The keys are also far too compact, and I feel like Lenovo could have made better use of the space available on the keyboard tray. It doesn’t help that the Yoga 900S’ Shift key is half-height, either, as this has been cut down to make room for its over-sized cursor keys.

Thankfully, the touchpad is a much more practical size, and is perfectly pleasant for daily navigation. Not only is it responsive, but multi-touch gestures were a breeze, making it easier to use than the Yoga 900’s touchpad.

Performance and battery life

The 900S’ biggest departure from the original Yoga 900, however, is its internal specifications. While its dual-core 1.1GHz Intel Core m5-6Y54 processor definitely isn’t to be sniffed at, it pales in comparison to the fully-fledged Skylake Core i7 found in its slightly chunkier 900 counterpart. The 900S also has just 8GB of RAM (again, not terrible), rather than 16GB.

Unsurprisingly, the 900S’ overall performance was significantly slower than the 900, with our rigorous 4K multimedia benchmarks resulting in an overall score of just 20. General use was relatively hassle free, but it got rather sluggish when I was multi-tasking or had particularly taxing applications running.

The 900S’ battery also stacks up poorly compared to the regular 900. Whereas the Yoga 900 lasted over 11hrs in our video playback test with the screen set to our standard brightness level of 170cd/m2, the 900S only managed 8hrs 39mins under the same conditions. Yes, that’s probably still enough to last you a full workday, but I was hoping for more given its lower screen resolution and more energy efficient CPU.

Conclusion

In the end, the only thing the Yoga 900S really has to recommend it is its thinner, lighter chassis, which, given its £1,000 price, isn’t really enough to make it a better buy than its slightly chunkier 900 sibling – especially now both laptops are roughly the same price. There’s also the worrying issue of its hit and miss wireless performance, which still hasn’t been fixed at time of writing.

Still, even if Lenovo do patch this problem with a new driver, everything else about the 900S just feels like one big compromise. If you’re after an ultra light laptop, then the regular Yoga 900 or Dell XPS 13 remain our top laptops of choice. Still stuck on what to get? Check out our list of the best laptops you can buy in 2016.

Buy the Lenovo Yoga 900S now from John Lewis