Gadgetory

well this is David of The Verge and this is the Lenovo IdeaPad yoga 13 part of Lenovo's new lineup of Windows 8 machines on the one hand this is a fairly normal looking laptop it weighs 3.5 pounds it's about 2/3 of an inch thick it has a mix of soft touch and kind of leathery materials it feels a little odd and not like a machine but is well built has a 13.3 inch display and a fairly standard set of ports for a laptop you get hdmi 2 USB ports and an SD card reader so you might never know that it does anything else other than a normal laptop until you push the screen back a little and find that it'll actually rotate 360 degrees all the way around that's why it's called yoga the device is super flexible and you can use it in a bunch of different positions you can use it like a laptop obviously or you can flip the screen all the way around to the back and hold it like a tablet in both hands you can also prop it up like a teepee which is pretty good for watching movies or use the base as a stand and have the screen pointing outwards the device also actually knows which orientation it's in and shifts accordingly so it'll make apps like PowerPoint it'll kick them straight into presentation mode when you put it into stand which is pretty cool you'll wind up using it like a laptop the vast majority the time but it's nice to have the other options when they're appropriate do your 13.3 inch display is a pretty good one it's a 1600 by 900 IPS display and has great viewing angles and color reproduction it's also a touch screen but it's not a particularly good one it occasionally registers taps as swipes and vice versa and sometimes just doesn't register anything at all it's not a huge problem and for the most part works fine but it's definitely there and unfortunately the yoga's trackpad doesn't really help matters either my surface is really smooth and it works great just as a pointer but things like to finger scrolling or edge gestures are really hit or miss on the keyboard on the other hand is great it's a lot like Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards with the smile design and the concave keys and they feel great though I don't love the extra row of keys on the right side which kind of throws everything off center I went up having to set my hands down and then shift one key to the left and then start typing before I would actually get it going so it has some crazy features but performance wise this is pretty much your average altar Brooke it handled all my daily tasks really well from streaming music to dozens of tabs to watching Netflix but it's really not great for gaming or anything intensive like that better life is solid you'll get about 5 hours which is pretty average for an ultra that gets totally destroyed by basically any kind of game Lenovo preloads a bunch of apps onto the yoga but it's a different sort of Windows bloatware that I'm used to there aren't really any pop-ups or nagging notifications from Norton or McAfee you just get a bunch of apps you don't really want kind of like a phone the yoga starts at $999 for a model running a core i3 processor but the model I tested had a core i5 along with four gigs of RAM Intel integrated graphics and a 128 gigabyte SSD for one hundred more than the base model it's a really solid ultrabook with a good screen a bunch of cool form factors and no huge flaws the touchscreen and trackpad were frustrating at points but neither as a deal-breaker it's definitely still clear that there are some bugs with drivers and with Windows 8 in general and those will get ironed out over time but if you want to buy into Windows 8 right now this is a really solid way in